On November 20, 2023, a significant event took place at Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon, marking the official inauguration of its new building. During this event, a team of experts of the Sustainable Transformative Transitions (Sus2Trans) project displayed the typology of decarbonization strategies. This typology is a key outcome of this project’s investigations that resulted from a comprehensive effort—particularly in analyzing over one million articles—to explore and establish effective decarbonization strategies in response to the urgent need for environmental sustainability.
The primary goal of the Sus2Trans project is to identify and understand effective decarbonization strategies with the highest socioeconomic benefits. This initiative is driven by the urgent need to align public and corporate policies and decisions with the ambitious climate objectives set for 2030, and achieving carbon neutrality by 2045. By exploring various strategies in terms of technology, context, and policies, the project aims to guide decision-making processes towards more sustainably friendly practices that conciliates environment with development.
The Sus2Trans project adopts a multidisciplinary approach, involving diverse teams from various Portuguese universities, including LNEG, IGOT, IPV and Iscte. These teams work in a synergistic manner, complementing each other's expertise. Six types of decarbonization strategies were identified, utilizing innovative semantic analysis techniques of large corpora, including literature (LDA+BERTopic) and policies (including brand new AI tools such as GPT-4). Additionally, the project offers an in-depth analysis of the impacts and feasibilities associated with each strategy, considering technological, contextual, and policy aspects. It is developing solutions to reconcile the policy-industry dilemma in decarbonization, allowing for the classification of strategies and analysis of current patterns, thereby contributing significantly to the global effort in combating climate change. Dozens of interested people visited the stand and inquired the members of the projects about these results and the potential to accelerate decarbonization in society.