Elaborating and testing the narratives Sample Clauses

Elaborating and testing the narratives. The main workshop sessions explored the four pathway narratives, seeking to flesh out key factors that might be expected to prevent or enable decarbonisation within each pathway. During the first session, participants were invited to explore technological, social and political factors; after lunch the focus was on the required policy responses to ensure achievement of deep decarbonisation and mitigate negative consequences of the pathway. Participants were also asked to suggest elements that appeared to be missing from the narratives, or any elements of the narratives that seemed implausible or internally inconsistent. The aim here is to ensure that the pathways stand up to scrutiny as representing broadly plausible (though not necessarily likely) alternative pathways by which European decarbonisation might be achieved. During the main workshop sessions, participants were asked to think in terms of an 80% reduction in GHG emissions as Europe’s decarbonisation goal. As a final component of the session, participants were asked their views on whether it was possible to envisage the pathway achieving a net zero target in 2050. For this exercise, participants were invited to provide a numerical score (1-10) representing how easy they found it to envisage the pathway achieving net zero, and discuss the rationales for their judgements. Box 1 provides a summary of the narratives, as they were presented to the workshop participants (see Appendix 3 for the slides presented).

Elaborating and testing the narratives. The first session of the workshop sought to elaborate the narratives: exploring how the pathways they depict might unfold, and in particular what factors might enable or prevent achievement of an 80% carbon target within each pathway. For this session, participants were divided into two break-out groups, each of which addressed two of the pathways. Participants were also invited to identify elements of the scenarios that were missing, implausible, or which appeared to be internally inconsistent.