Co-benefits of green recovery packages for climate and society in response to the COVID-19 crisis

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, unprecedented confinements were enforced in many countries, leading to reduced global CO2 emissions. Governments issued short term economic rescue packages, and longer term recovery packages are under development.

If used to support transformation to low-carbon energy supply, these stimulus packages have the potential to deliver both economic and climate goals, leading to long-lasting effects on the emission of greenhouse gases and aerosols even after recovery of the economy.COCLIM-19 aims to understand the effect of different recovery pathways after the COVID-19 crisis on the climate, and to provide stakeholders and users with information and data on the benefits of supporting low-carbon solutions.We will perform simulations with SMHI’s climate model EC-Earth3 in coordination with other modeling groups and linked to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) using different emission pathways reflecting alternative ways to recover from the COVID-19 crisis.

We will investigate short and long term global and regional climate response signals to the different COVID-19 recovery pathways and will focus particularly on extremes over Sweden such as heat waves, droughts and flooding.

Together with stakeholders from various societal sectors, we will analyse, discuss and interpret the results from our analysis and the consequences for the environment, society, economy and health to provide a cross-sectoral synthesis of the results.