The DIAMOND project, funded by the European Union’s Research and Innovation HORIZON EUROPE programme, aims to contribute to the development of the next generation of fully open IAMs, which will be sufficiently equipped to scientifically underpin and support an accelerated transition towards circular, resilient, desirable, and sustainable climate neutrality.

The project’s activities can be broken down into five components: (i) Codesign with stakeholders; (ii) Update & Upgrade core models; (iii) Integrate & Expand different modules; (iv) Apply & Explore different groundbreaking scenarios; and finally (v) Open the modelling ‘black-box’!

DIAMOND will update, upgrade, and fully open six IAMs that are emblematic in scientific and policy processes, improving their sectoral and technological detail, spatiotemporal resolution, and geographic granularity. It will further enhance their modelling capacity to assess the feasibility and desirability of Paris-compliant mitigation pathways, their interplay with adaptation, circular economy, and other SDGs, their distributional and equity effects, and their resilience to extremes, as well as robust risk management and investment strategies. This will be supported by integrating them with tools and insights from psychology, finance research, behavioural and labour economics, operational research, and physical science. The project will develop a transdisciplinary scientific approach to legitimise the implementation process and co-create research questions that stretch the frontiers of climate science, as well as establish vibrant communities of practice to transparently open model enhancements and to develop capacities, thereby lowering the entrance barriers to the established IAM community.

Communication and exploitation lie at the core of the DIAMOND project, which seeks to involve stakeholders to elicit policy-relevant questions and specifications for model development, as well as research questions that shall drive the scenario process of validating the newly produced integrated assessment models (IAMs).

Following this principle, the DIAMOND visual identity was designed to suit the project's idea, comprising aspects and characteristics that match to its theme, support the concept of the project and includes elements and features that correspond to its topic. The diamond shape represents the project’s relation with the six IAMs, which altogether form the edges of the model-ecosystem diamond. The visual identity ensures a consistent, professional outreach towards the targeted audiences during the implementation of our communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities, and additionally consists of a flyer (link) to create visibility for partner countries, a leaflet on the project objectives, methods, and expected results (link), a poster to use as promotional material in physical/online events (link), a targeted roll-up banner for policy events (link); as well as a presentation with basic information on the project (link).

The DIAMOND website will serve as the central portal of the project, aiming to present information on the project and disseminate its results, as well as act as a reference site with material and links related to the models produced and used, the themes analysed, other research projects and initiatives of relevance, and news on climate action and science. The development of the website is essential to the effective promotion of the project concept, progress, activities, results, and stakeholder engagement.

You can visit the project’s website is https://climate-diamond.eu/.

Our kick-off meeting was held as a hybrid event on December 15 and December 16, 2022!

Apart from organisational, management, and operational aspects, a very interesting discussion on the openness of climate policy models was also a central part of the two-day meeting, aiming to lead to a solid strategy that will help us eventually make our IAMs accessible rather than black boxes, and to facilitate policymakers and stakeholders in better understanding their insightful results. Representatives of all nineteen partners (link) discussed the challenges, opportunities, and near-term objectives of our project (see here for the project’s overall objectives). Modelling super-groups had the opportunity to present the six envisaged IAMs while all other partners were given the floor to present the added value of their domain and tools of expertise, aimed at further expanding model capabilities. We collectively had the opportunity to also discuss how each bit fits into the DIAMOND project puzzle, and how each piece of this puzzle integrates with one another (link).

With this kick-off meeting, DIAMOND started its exciting journey to update, upgrade and/or open 6 well-established IAM frameworks in the next four years.

An all-day meeting for the OMNIA model—one of the six open integrated assessment models (IAMs) that DIAMOND will produce—took place on March 3, 2023 in Turin, Italy, to kick off the development of the model.

In particular, among the objectives of the DIAMOND project is to develop the Open-source MuNdus Integrated Assessment model (OMNIA), a customised, open-access global IAM largely drawing from the TIMES framework and the research expertise and capability of core development teams. The great ambition of OMNIA is to enable a broader community of practice, open to the entire modelling community: based on shared development and best-in-practice approaches to open modelling, OMNIA will assure clear results, accessible to all stakeholders and policymakers. The model will integrate several advancements to perform detailed regional analysis. Regional representation will be expanded to the 28 IEA regions, with additional detail for Europe. OMNIA will rely on up-to-date technology datasets and include additional technologies for credible policy analysis. It will also incorporate a spatially explicit representation of key energy carrier trades, including bioenergy, hydrogen, as well as commodities including captured CO2. The project will also enhance the model’s climate module to estimate global average temperature changes of scenarios and include abatement supply-cost curves for all major non-CO2 options, based on up-to-date assessments.

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