IIASA at the UNFCCC Bonn Climate Change Conference 2024

In 2023, both the Paris Agreement on climate change and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development underwent stocktaking exercises and were found to be far off track from meeting their goals. As the effects of climate change gain magnitude, IIASA scientists work closely with the United Nations to inform future climate goals and policy, ensuring that those are based on rigorous scientific assessment.

The initiative of UNDESA and UNFCCC on raising the ambition and effectiveness of policies for climate action is co-led by Senior Advisor to the IIASA Advancing Systems Analysis Program, Luis Gomez-Echeverri, who co-leads the UNFCCC/UNDESA Expert Group on Climate and SDG Synergy. As part of the UNFCCC Bonn Climate Change Conference, Gomez-Echeverri and his colleagues presented at a special event titled, Seeking synergies across Rio Conventions and the SDGs: unlocking strategies for a multi-crisis world.  During the event, they unveiled four reports focusing on how action to tackle climate change and the SDGs can be accelerated through synergies, notably in the key areas of policy frameworks, financial systems, knowledge and data, and cities. The four thematic reports lay the groundwork for the 2024 global synthesis report on climate and SDG synergy, which will be released in July.

Among other participants at the conference, IIASA Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group Leader, Shonali Pachauri, presented at the session titled, Tracking progress towards implementation of NDCs, discussing the analysis of carbon debt following different pathways. The session focused on the evaluation of the progress made in implementing climate mitigation policies and ways of incorporating justice into climate mitigation pathways, with an opportunity for country policymakers to share their national perspectives.

In addition, IIASA guest researcher Chris Smith was involved in two events, promoting the indicators of global climate change 2023 — an annual update to some of the key physical climate change metrics that were assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the 6th Assessment Report, prepared by Working Group 1.

Finally, during the conference, as part of the ELEVATE project workshop focused on the political economy of climate agreements, IIASA researchers led a breakout session titled, Discussing the governance of carbon dioxide removal. The workshop was organized by Climate Strategies in partnership with Aarhus University and CMCC, with support from IIASA researchers Elina Brutschin and Setu Pelz.