PhD Candidate for the EU HORIZON 2020 project LOCALISED

University of Twente (UT), Netherlands

Updated: over 2 years ago
Deadline: 21 Nov 2021

It is a four year project that has started in October 2021. The LOCALISED consortium encompasses 12 partners from 6 countries: Germany, Austria, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.

The overall objective of LOCALISED is to downscale national decarbonization trajectories consistent with Europe's net-zero target to the local levels and provide the results to local authorities, citizens and businesses, in a way that would speed up the uptake of mitigation and adaptation actions. To this end, the project will create effective and clearly understandable tools that transform localised data on possible decarbonisation pathways by 2030 and 2050 into knowledge for action, namely: (1) the Decarbonisation Profiler for municipalities, regions and their citizens, providing information in all 24 EU languages, and (2) the Net-Zero Business Consultant tool. The tools will allow local authorities and policy-makers as well as citizens and businesses to identify viable combinations and best practices of (sectoral) mitigation and adaptation measures for every NUTS3 region on how to reach the goals of the downscaled pathways and to introduce an adapted-to-case service for implementation and monitoring of Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs). The project will additionally engage with EU citizen groups to inform them how climate change and different EU net-zero scenarios positively and negatively affect their lives and what share of mitigation can be enhanced via key behavioural change.

We will mainly work on one work package (WP4: Cross-sectoral mitigation and adaptation on the regional level) and contribute to almost all other). Hereafter, a description of WP4:

WP4's general objective: to turn disaggregated mitigation targets per regions into feasible cross-sectoral mitigation options and to calculate adaptation needs and feasibility, based on regional climate change impact, risk and vulnerability evaluations as well as existing climate governance modes and adaptation-mitigation co-benefits. The core topic of WP4 is to connect mitigation scenarios and pathways with climate change impacts and adaptation needs on the regional level.

Your tasks include contributing to:

  • developing a comprehensive database of potential adaptation and mitigation measures in European regions. The measures will cover the areas of regional, municipal, individual and business actions;
  • combining suitable cross-sectoral combinations of measures in order to reach regional mitigation targets. WP4 will define requirements for the suitability of measures for certain regions leading to best practices dependent on the social and cultural context;

    • 3 identifying climate change impacts, risks and vulnerabilities per region based on mitigation trajectories/ scenarios, and to develop innovative adaptation options based on climate analogues/ twin cities combined with feasibility assessments and adaptation and mitigation co-benefits.

    The UT team will lead WP4 and is mainly working on Tasks 1 and 3 building on existing work of downscaling regional (NUTS3-level) risk and vulnerability assessments and adaptation and mitigation measures in European regions and cities.


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