The "Calculator" models, such as the Global Calculator (www.globalcalculator.org), have been increasingly present in the climate discussions of the EU. Users of these models are provided with direct control over a set of "levers" which represent different GHG abatement ambition levels with respect to behavior, technology or practices patterns in different sectors to formulate their own decarbonization pathways. Built on the existing calculators, the EUCalc (www.european-calculator.eu) is currently under development for testing GHG abatement pathways at the EU and its member states scale.
The “core” modules of EUCalc follow the bottom-up “engineering” approach by being very detailed and technology-explicit. However, similar to other BU models, the EUCalc cannot represent all the complex market connections and mechanisms and typical socioeconomic impacts cannot be directly obtained, e.g. ripple effects of an EU member State’s GHG abatement efforts on the rest of EU and on the rest of the world through trade linkages.
To address this issue, the EUCalc contains several modules outside of the bottom-up modeling core for assessing the social economic and trade impacts of user-defined decarbonization pathways. To model trade effects, a global CGE model based on the GTAP-E model is used. A major research task is thus to integrate the bottom-up modules with the CGE model by translating the user-defined pathways consisting of "lever settings" at very disaggregated sectoral levels into economic scenarios to be computed in the CGE featuring a much higher sectoral aggregation level and with parsimonious representation of more sophisticated technical relationships. The objective of this paper is therefore to document the modeling efforts in harnessing the rich engineering details in the core modules of EUCalc for formulating scenarios to be simulated in the CGE model. This objective is realized in the paper by using the transport sector as an example.