Addressing the Science-Policy Gap: EQUINOX Workshops at BELSPO

The EQUINOX workshops, hosted at the headquarters of the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) in Brussels on 11–12 December 2025, represented a critical milestone in European science-to-policy translation. Organised under the framework of the Equinox Process^[11]Link to footnoteEquinox Process - JPI Climate — an initiative operated by JPI Climate and supported by the Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action MAGICA — these parallel, highly integrated tracks aimed to bridge the gaps between climate science, economic forecasting, and transformative societal action. Concluding shortly after the UNFCCC COP30 negotiations in Belém, Brazil, the workshops gathered national and European policymakers, scientific advisors, funding agency representatives, and financial regulators to establish a coordinated roadmap for climate neutrality and resilience.

The dual workshop tracks focused on two critical dimensions of climate action: the Equinox Workshop on Societal Transformation in the Face of Climate Change and the Equinox Dialogue on Modelling the Economics of Climate Change. In the societal transformation track, participants emphasised that successful adaptation and mitigation require moving beyond top-down technocratic mandates. Instead, they called for the systematic integration of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to foster public legitimacy and build local civic capacity. In parallel, the economic modelling track delivered a comprehensive critique of conventional Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), highlighting their systemic failure to represent climate damages, adaptation costs, macroeconomic risks, and distributional equity.

The strategic direction defined during these workshops outlines a clear pathway toward major European policy and scientific milestones. The findings of the tracks are structured to directly inform the upcoming Climate Neutrality Forum in May 2026, the bilateral European-African CAPA project^[10]Link to footnoteCAPA Project Launches with Official Kick-off Meeting in Brussels on 19 May - JPI Climate, and the co-design of the JPI Climate Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for the European Research Area (ERA) spanning 2026–2035. By aligning scientific funding, macroeconomic modelling, and community-centric governance, the Equinox Process establishes a collaborative knowledge framework designed to keep European climate policy grounded in empirical, actionable research.

The societal transformation track on 11 December 2025, co-organised by the CICERO Center for International Climate Research, focused on the human and institutional dimensions of the ecological transition. This one-day workshop addressed how governance structures, public engagement strategies, and policy design can drive legitimate and equitable climate action.

The core question of this track addressed how governance and public engagement must be designed to enable legitimising transformations. Elina Bardram, Director for Climate Resilience and Information Management at DG CLIMA and Mission Manager for the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, delivered a central directive:

We don't always need to reinvent the wheel, sometimes the most simple solutions are the most powerful. We just need to harness them. Citizens' capacity shouldn't be undermined by policymakers...

This perspective was supported by Siret Talve (Tallinn University, Board Member of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change) and Anne Maria Eikeset (Lead Researcher at Norges Bank Investment Management), who highlighted the need to align institutional and financial investment practices with community values.

The second roundtable, moderated by Philippe Tulkens (Head of Unit, Climate and Planetary Boundaries, European Commission, DG Research and Innovation), focused on transitioning from identified research gaps to concrete action.

A notable point of discussion emerged regarding the pacing of transition policies. Some representatives from municipal and European missions advocated for rapid, regulatory-driven interventions to meet the strict carbon timelines of the European Green Deal. However, researchers in the social sciences cautioned that top-down, technocratic pacing, if decoupled from local consultation, can trigger significant public backlash due to immediate cost-of-living impacts. The consensus affirmed that public engagement is most effective when climate policy is integrated with tangible co-benefits, such as improved urban air quality, public health, and localised job creation.

The parallel track, the Equinox Dialogue on Modelling the Economics of Climate Change (11–12 December 2025), was co-organised by The Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics (CTNTE). The dialogue opened with a video message from IPCC Chair Sir Jim Skea, who emphasised the urgent need for national, policy-relevant scenarios that address real-world transition barriers.

Annela Anger-Kraavi (Chief Executive, CTNTE) and Elmar Kriegler (Head of the Research Department, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research — PIK) set the analytical scene by identifying structural flaws within current Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). The dialogue structured its evaluation of economic modelling around four core limitations:

On Day 2, opened by Gregor Laumann (German Aerospace Center, DLR), discussions focused on model usability for financial regulators. Jörn Hoffmann (Application Partnerships Lead, ECMWF) detailed the potential of integrating high-resolution Earth observations with economic projections. Phil Summerton expanded on the challenge of getting the balance right in policy-facing models:

If they're too simple, they are not convincing... policy-makers often just want to know the answer but they also don't want just a 'black box'...

Summerton argued that models must be highly transparent regarding their sensitivities and the specific events or information to which they respond.

A key outcome of this session was a clear message from representatives of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). These institutional actors stated that they require active, empirical support from climate scientists to develop forward-looking climate change risk indicators that can be directly integrated into macroeconomic stress-testing and sovereign risk portfolios.

A clear tension emerged between mainstream neoclassical modellers, who advocated for incrementally adding parameters to existing IAM frameworks, and heterodox economists, who argued that conventional optimisation and equilibrium concepts are structurally incapable of representing a systemic transition. The heterodox perspective maintained that climate policy must be driven by physical boundaries and social objectives, leaving economists to develop the financing structures afterward.

The analytical outcomes of the EQUINOX workshops carry direct, far-reaching implications for both Belgian national and broader European science and climate policies.

European science and adaptation policy

At the European level, the findings of the societal transformation track are designed to directly inform the drafting of the new EU Climate Adaptation Plan and the execution of the Horizon Europe Missions. The proceedings demonstrated that the Mission on Climate Change Adaptation and the Mission for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities must move beyond funding isolated technological solutions. Instead, they must establish integrated funding calls that require physical science and economic proposals to be co-designed with Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to ensure local democratic legitimacy and prevent public backlash.

Redesigning research funding structures

For research funding organisations, the Equinox Process signals a structural shift in how future research agendas are designed across the European Research Area (ERA). The JPI Climate Action Group Enabling Societal Transformation (EST) is leveraging the outputs of these Brussels workshops to define the scope and content of the next phase of the SOLSTICE transnational call. Future funding architectures must prioritise transdisciplinary consortia that bridge macroeconomic modelling with qualitative, bottom-up behavioural research. This strategic direction will be codified in the upcoming JPI Climate Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for the ERA spanning 2026–2035.

This international alignment ensures that Belgian national scientific funding is directly connected to global weather forecasting, early warning networks, and socio-economic adaptation frameworks in highly vulnerable regions, bridging the gap between European domestic science and global climate justice.

The EQUINOX workshops brought together four primary stakeholder groups, revealing distinct institutional motivations, contributions, and areas of strategic alignment or conflict.

Academic and research institutions

Represented by leading research bodies such as CICERO, CMCC, GWS, PIK, and UCLouvain, this stakeholder group prioritised scientific rigour, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the overhaul of outdated modelling paradigms. They argued that conventional economic advice has frequently acted as a barrier to climate action by underestimating climate risks and overpromoting standard market-based solutions. Their contribution focused on presenting empirical evidence — such as localised physical risks and behavioural barriers — and demanding long-term, transdisciplinary funding frameworks that place social sciences at the centre of mitigation planning.

Research funders and science managers

Comprising organisations like BELSPO, the Research Council of Norway, the National Science Centre of Poland, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR-PT), this group focused on the administrative mechanics of research governance and strategic coordination within the European Research Area. Their primary concern is maximising the return on public research investments and ensuring that funded science is "actionable" and accessible to policymakers. They contributed by coordinating transnational calls, such as SOLSTICE and the upcoming European Partnerships (STR and RCH), and establishing open science mandates to eliminate research silos.

Financial institutions and asset managers

Represented by Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Investment Bank (EIB), these stakeholders are driven by the urgent need to manage system-wide physical and transition risks to safeguard asset values. They highlighted that current global economic models are virtually useless for micro-prudential supervision and portfolio risk assessment because they fail to represent transition capital costs, regional asset stranding, and financial sector contagion. They actively called on the scientific community to help them develop empirical, forward-looking macro-financial climate risk indicators.

Policymakers and intergovernmental bodies

Including representatives from the European Commission (DG RTD and DG CLIMA), the European Parliament, and national government agencies, this group is responsible for executing decarbonisation mandates under strict legislative timelines. They require clear, legally defensible, and highly communicative scenarios to justify climate regulations to a public increasingly concerned with cost-of-living increases. They cautioned that overly complex, academic modelling can result in inaccessible "black boxes" that hinder rapid policy execution.

An evaluation of the EQUINOX workshops demonstrates that their primary strength lay in the deliberate, physical integration of the societal transformation and economic modelling tracks. By forcing a direct confrontation between social scientists and macroeconomic modellers at BELSPO, the organisers exposed the fundamental flaw of conventional transition planning: treating behavioural, institutional, and social barriers as minor frictions rather than as the primary determinants of transition feasibility.

However, the discussions exposed several deep, unresolved tensions, logical contradictions, and neglected dimensions that warrant closer examination.

The "black box" usability paradox

A central tension exists between the scientific demand for model complexity and the policy demand for operational simplicity. Modelers argued that to make IAMs realistic, they must integrate multi-sector dynamics, financial risk transmissions, and localised technology transfer parameters. Conversely, policymakers and financial regulators explicitly stated that if a model becomes too complex, it turns into an impenetrable "black box" that cannot be utilised to justify controversial legislative measures. This creates a paradox: a model simple enough to be politically convincing is scientifically inaccurate, while a model complex enough to be scientifically rigorous is politically unusable.

The labour and skill capacity deficit

While both tracks focused extensively on the deployment of advanced technologies — such as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), rapid grid electrification, and residential retrofitting — the discussions revealed a glaring blind spot regarding the severe shortage of skilled labour required to physically execute these transitions across Europe. Decarbonisation scenarios that assume frictionless, rapid technology deployment are structurally decoupled from the physical reality of highly constrained regional labour markets.

Systemic risk distortion through shadow pricing

The dialogue revealed that standard economic models commonly use a single, global shadow carbon price to minimise policy costs across scenarios. As noted by heterodox economists, this practice systematically underestimates actual risk and damage costs, as well as the transition costs to Net Zero. Because the worst physical climate impacts will occur in developing nations, European market metrics fail to reflect these catastrophic systemic tipping points, leading to a profound distortion of the economic justification for early, aggressive mitigation.

Neglect of capital costs and sovereign debt in the Global South

While the economic modelling track rightly criticised the lack of detailed finance in IAM scenarios, the discussion heavily prioritised climate risk indicators for European banking portfolios and classification systems. It largely neglected the compounding sovereign debt crisis in the Global South, where the high cost of capital acts as a primary barrier to transition investments. Economic models that assume frictionless global capital mobilisation completely fail to represent the real-world financial constraints faced by developing nations under Article 9 of the Paris Agreement.

The conflict of local scale in community decision-making

Social researchers noted that when transition decisions are shifted to community-based models, the weight of climate mitigation is often significantly reduced if it is combined with immediate local concerns, such as noise pollution, zoning conflicts, or spatial optimisation. This highlights a fundamental contradiction in the "inclusive co-creation" paradigm: while localising decision-making increases policy legitimacy, it can simultaneously dilute and delay the implementation of national and global decarbonisation targets.

The strategic outputs of the EQUINOX workshops establish a clear roadmap for the climate science-to-policy interface over the next one to three years (2026–2028), marked by several key milestones.

2026: Model refinement and the Climate Neutrality Forum

In the immediate term, the summary reports published from the BELSPO workshops will serve as foundational inputs for the upcoming Climate Neutrality Forum in May 2026. This forum will focus on translating these structural modelling critiques into concrete modelling protocols, forcing major European modelling groups to systematically incorporate physical damages and localised adaptation costs into the next generation of transition scenarios.

2026: Launching the AU-EU CAPA initiative

On 19 May 2026, the bilateral European-African CAPA project will officially launch its activities with a hybrid Kick-off Meeting in Brussels during the CCSE stakeholder forum. Over the 2026–2027 period, this initiative will focus on "networking the networks," aligning research and climate services directly with African regional priorities across water, food security, and transport, providing a practical model for equitable global research cooperation.

2026: The AMOC in Focus assessment report

Led jointly by JPI Climate and JPI Oceans, this initiative will convene its second major writing workshop in Brussels (29 June–2 July 2026) to finalise a comprehensive review report updating the physical observations and potential tipping points of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This report, planned for publication in late 2026, will explicitly bridge the science-policy gap by translating physical ocean dynamics directly into macroeconomic damage and adaptation strategies, helping financial institutions model systemic sovereign risk.

2027–2028: Technical input for the IPCC AR7 and the Global Stocktake

In the medium term, the integrated science-policy frameworks developed under the Equinox Process are structured to serve as direct inputs to the technical dialogue of the next UNFCCC Global Stocktake (2027–2028) and the IPCC Seventh Assessment Cycle (AR7). This will ensure that European climate science maintains its global leadership by providing peer-reviewed methodologies that successfully link economic modelling, physical science, and social humanities.

Recommended areas for urgent investigation

To address the critical gaps exposed during the Brussels workshops, research funding organisations should immediately prioritise the following three areas for further investigation:

1. Macro-financial modelling of sovereign risk and capital costs: Research must be funded to develop regionalised economic models that discard the single-carbon-price assumption and explicitly incorporate sovereign debt constraints, borrowing cost differentials, and macro-financial risk transmissions in the Global South.
2. The political economy of labour constraints in decarbonisation: Comprehensive empirical studies are required to map physical labour capacities, skill shortages, and vocational training pipelines across European regions, ensuring that modelled technology deployment pathways reflect regional labour supply realities.
3. Empirical modelling of social safety nets during transition shocks: Future investigations must evaluate the macroeconomic and behavioural impacts of social support mechanisms, such as basic income or targeted energy transition subsidies, in building public legitimacy and mitigating social pushback during cost-of-living shocks.

Key institutional commitments and program details

Comparison of transition modelling paradigms

Empirical climate system and physical observation data points

Physical climate anomalies demonstrate the disconnect between accelerating atmospheric changes and standard, smoothed economic transition modelling assumptions:

Footnotes

1. 11.Equinox Process - JPI Climate
2. 10.CAPA Project Launches with Official Kick-off Meeting in Brussels on 19 May - JPI Climate