CCCEP was established in October 2008 with the aim of advancing public and private action on climate change through rigorous, innovative research. Even though much of our research is ongoing, we have made several major academic contributions:

- Improving understanding of the uncertainties in climate models, developing state-of-the-art economic models of decision-making under uncertainty and applying them to climate change, and pursuing novel methods of participatory assessment/modelling.

- Exploring different routes to a global climate agreement and alternatives to state-based governance, all the time emphasising the role of institutions.

- Advancing knowledge on the potential for climate-friendly forms of development, and development-friendly forms of adaptation. We have advanced new integrated methodologies for identifying adaptation priorities, including 'vulnerability hotspots'.

- Conducting interdisciplinary research on interventions towards a low-carbon economy, including robust econometric evaluation of the impacts of existing policies, analysis of carbon markets that bridges theory and practice, and an examination of the roles of states and markets.

- Developing new methodologies bridging the gap between macro-scale simulation modelling and micro-scale, context-specific approaches.

To build research capacity, we have strengthened the links between key disciplines and the climate debate, trained over 50 PhD students and provided new university courses at all levels. We have actively engaged with key decision-makers at all stages of the research process, influencing the UN climate negotiations at a high level, working closely with the World Bank and other international organisations, engaging heavily in UK climate policy on critical issues such as the fourth statutory carbon budget, impacting on policy-making in many other countries and engaging with private decision-makers, e.g. through our collaboration with Munich Re. We have also secured c. £28 million in leveraged funding.

Extensive consultations have highlighted the need to address the financial crisis/downturn, the continuing absence of a comprehensive international climate treaty, and recent controversies on climate science. They have stressed the need for more integrated approaches to climate research, to continue making a distinctive contribution in the context of other climate research, and to contribute to ESRC Strategic Priorities.

Our five research themes for Phase Two are:

1. Understanding green growth and climate-compatible development: what could constitute green growth or climate-compatible development in industrialised and developing countries?

2. Advancing climate finance and investment: how can we unlock major flows of finance into both adaptation and mitigation in different contexts? What are the implications of such flows?

3. Evaluating the performance of climate policies: how can we assess the performance of different climate policies and how can we understand the scope for policy learning?

4. Managing climate risks and uncertainties and strengthening climate services: how can we promote new approaches to the assessment, management and communication of climate risks/uncertainties?

5. Enabling rapid transitions in mitigation and adaptation: how can we understand the scope for rapid transitions to dramatically cut emissions and adapt to significant climate change?

Beyond the planned scientific programme, we propose to a CCCEP Innovation Fund with the aim of stimulating, developing and disseminating innovative ideas from both the academic and practitioner communities.

Our plans for Phase Two build on the solid institutional foundations of Phase One, including CCCEP's position at LSE/Leeds, its management structure and its key staff. However, we also plan to refresh the team. We will continue to engage with key stakeholders throughout the research process and to exploit a range of pathways to impact.

Potential Impact:
We will seek to inform and influence decision-making by actively engaging with public policy-makers, businesses and voluntary-sector organisations.

We will consolidate the policy engagement initiated in Phase One, but will also broaden it to include a wider set of countries that are major emitters of greenhouse gases and/or are 'hotspots' of vulnerability to climate change.

We will use our very strong channels of communication with UK policy-makers, both nationally and locally, through a process of continual engagement that informs the scope of our work and allows opportunities for research findings to be fed into decision-making in an appropriate and timely way.

In UK national government, we will be engaged at various levels, from ministers through to civil-service directorates and divisions.

We will continue to inform UK national policy-making through written and oral evidence to parliamentary committees, input to the Committee on Climate Change, partnership activities with the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, briefings for MPs and peers, and collaborations with bodies such as the Environment Agency.

We will strengthen and develop strong links with local authorities and with the networks of actors involved in low-carbon cities, in the UK and internationally, who require information and advice about low-carbon targets or financing and delivering the transition to a low-carbon economy.

We will increase our activities to engage EU decision-makers (particularly in the Commission Directorate-Generals for Climate Action and for Energy), especially on the future development of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the delivery of emissions targets for 2020 and beyond.

We will increase our efforts to engage policy-makers in other selected major-emitting countries, such as those that are introducing, planning or considering Emissions Trading Schemes and related carbon markets (e.g. Australia, China and South Korea).

Contacts will also be increased with national and local policy-makers on climate-compatible development in sub-Saharan Africa, which is a vulnerability hotspot facing significant adaptation challenges.

We will also continue to support the negotiations towards an international agreement on climate change, particularly through engagement with the annual summits of the UNFCCC and the G20.

We will further be able to take advantage of long-standing, high-level relationships with major international organisations, especially the multilateral development banks, including the World Bank and the EBRD.

Major projects on green growth will also be conducted in partnership with the OECD and the Global Green Growth Institute.

Our engagement with business will continue to focus on those sectors particularly closely connected with our scientific programme.

One is the financial-services sector, where (re)insurance companies and catastrophe modelling firms will be key targets for engagement, while our research on carbon markets will create opportunities for engagements with investment banks and other providers. In addition, our work on green growth and low-carbon innovation should lead to an increasingly deep engagement with institutional investors, i.e. pension and sovereign-wealth funds.

Our work on the links between mitigation policies and economic performance will be of strong interest to carbon-intensive sectors such as power and heavy manufacturing.

Our work on adaptation will be especially useful to sectors facing the challenge of investing in long-lived assets under climate change, notably energy and water supply, and our work on climate services will be relevant to organisations such as the Met Office.

By continuing to work with NGOs (not least through our Steering Committee where we hope to have continued inputs from WWF UK), we should be able to gain access to information to create new research possibilities, and sometimes better enable them to exert influence.