Advanced models to bridge the gap between climate and energy policy and reality

A new EU-funded project led by Charles University will provide policymakers with more effective tools for the green transition.

Charles University will coordinate the newly funded Socio-Economic Energy-Climate Modelling for European Green Transition (M4G) project. M4G is the fourth in a series of successful projects (ECOCEP, GEMCLIME, and GEOCEP) led by Charles University in cooperation with its international consortium over more than a decade.

The European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme funds the project with EUR 1,803,600 under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).

The project starts in October 2026, in the year of the MSCA programme’s 30th anniversary.

The project will provide state-of-the-art models to support climate and energy policies in achieving the net-zero emissions target and the energy transition. The research work will integrate energy and climate models with natural Earth systems to evaluate extreme weather risks, ecosystem health and critical resource demands. It will also model individual consumer choices, technology adoption, adaptive strategies and distributional equity to embed human decision-making within these models. Finally, the research work will develop, among other things, advanced policy assessment tools, sustainable finance mechanisms and international trade strategies to optimise global decarbonisation efforts. This approach creates a balanced portfolio of models capturing the social, economic and natural factors relevant to the climate and energy policies of the European Union and other political entities.

In practice, M4G promotes international knowledge exchange by coordinating the secondment of researchers between top-tier European universities and international partners. Professor Karel Janda assumes the leadership of the coordinator, with Milan Ščasný as co-coordinator and Jean-François Auger at the management. 

Roughly 120 secondments between the participants will be organised, several of them benefiting to PhD students to provide them with a network, advanced qualifications to springboard their career.

The European beneficiaries form a research network of leading academic institutions in the field, including the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, the London School of Economics, the Toulouse School of Economics, the University of Oxford and ETH Zurich.

The international partners extend the project’s global reach to other continents, with leading universities including Auckland, Berkeley, Cape Town, Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Peking, Princeton, Singapore and Yale, among others.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101265385 (M4G). Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.