The project is a joint venture led by CICERO together with collaborating partners FNI, Statistics Norway (SSB), Norwegian Centre for Transportation Research (TØI), the Frisch Centre and NIBIO. Together with 29 user partners, covering governmental entities, industry and business organisations, environmental organisations and other NGOs, the research partners will work together to synthesize and develop knowledge on how climate policies should be organized and designed in order to be effective.

All economic sectors

The project is entitled “PLATform for Open and Nationally accessible climate policy knowledge" (PLATON) and will consist of six different working packages (WPs). FNI Senior Researcher Jørgen Wettestad will lead one of them, on the interaction between national and international – particularly European – climate policy instruments.

'Building on FNI’s solid expertise on international climate policy we are looking forward to participating in this exciting and important project’, says Wettestad.

Other WPs with participation from FNI's Jørgen Wettestad and Lars H. Gulbrandsen will cover the wide range of policies applying to all relevant economic sectors (agriculture, forestry and landscaping, the transportation and non-ETS sectors, as well as the sectors covered by the ETS).

User involvement

A separate WP will analyse the relationship between policy instruments and actual behaviour, and finally, a separate WP is designated for communication and stakeholder involvement, which will be a key part of the project. The goal is to ensure that the knowledge synthesised is relevant and reaches policymakers, public administration, business actors, NGOs, the civil society and the international research community. In other words, the ambitions for user involvement, communication and outreach are high.

We have great expectations for PLATON and we hope that it can help bring about a more enlightened climate policy debate in the years to come, so that politicians and stakeholders can concentrate on the actual political disagreements, not on the assumptions and facts’, says Hege Hisdal, program director of KLIMAFORSK.

You can read more about the PLATON project here. Our website will also bring updates as the project unfolds.