TRANSIENCE

The TRANSIENCE project addresses the need to approach climate action, resource efficiency, and circularity performance as integrated, economy-wide, cross-cutting issues. This need is growingly gaining attention in policy and the industry itself, stimulating the development of new industrial policies in Europe and worldwide. Currently, however, there is little progress in conceptualizing the circular economy and understanding its interactions with climate action. State-of-the-art modelling capacity to capture the interplay of the two agendas and their implications for energy intensive sectors as well as to represent the European industry’s transformation in line with the region’s vision for climate neutrality is not yet fully developed.

TRANSIENCE will undertake a comprehensive characterization and assessment of circularity principles and measures vis-à-vis decarbonization, by looking at the twin transition (decarbonization and digitalization) of European industries through the lenses of global competitiveness, innovation, and holistic sustainability. It will produce MIC3, a consistent, fully open-source model ecosystem to assess industrial circularity, decarbonization, and sustainability. A series of interoperable modules on the socioeconomic, service and product, material, industrial, energy-system, and environmental perspectives of the transformation of European industry will be developed and integrated, building on and opening the code of leading modelling tools. MIC3 will finally be used in extensive scenario modelling to produce diverse pathways toward a material-efficient, circular, climate-neutral, and sustainable European industry.

Transparency, openness, and knowledge sharing will be promoted, and technical capacities will be developed in four industrial agglomerations in the EU, moving beyond stakeholder consultation, onto model co-development, continuous validation of assumptions, co-creation of scenario modelling, evaluation of the desirability and usability of the developed model and insights, and eventually co-production of science and action.

The project contributions of the Technology Assessment group focus on prospective environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of industrial processes in key sectors such as production of steel, concrete, pulp and paper, and chemicals, which will be key for reaching Europe’s ambitious climate goals. To this end, we will collaborate with consortium partners specialized in material flow analysis, circular economy measures, and modeling of industrial processes and clusters. The outcomes of the LCA are also supposed to be used as a basis for the broad implementation of cross border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM).