CIRCOMOD presents research on circular economy strategies at IAMC 2024 event

The Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC) is a key global platform for advancing integrated assessment modeling in support of climate policy and sustainability. Many members of the CIRCOMOD project are long-standing participants in the IAMC community and regularly contribute to its meetings and initiatives.

Continuing this tradition, CIRCOMOD actively participated in the Seventeenth IAMC Annual Meeting, held on November 4–6, 2024, at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. The meeting brought together leading researchers and modelling experts to discuss pathways toward sustainable and climate-resilient futures.

Marianne Zotin from Utrecht University (UU) represented CIRCOMOD by presenting the project’s analytical framework and preliminary findings from a key deliverable focused on circular economy (CE) options in service provision, demand, and the use phase of products.

The presentation had three main goals:

• To identify relevant circular economy and resource efficiency strategies across sectors covered by CIRCOMOD and compile supporting evidence from the literature;
• To select strategies suitable for integration into CIRCOMOD’s modelling work;
• To clarify terminology and definitions related to CE, and offer conceptual background on the prioritised options.

Zotin emphasized that while the focus was on technical circularity options per use-phase sector, some product-specific behavioral strategies were also considered. Although behavioral decision-making processes were not addressed in detail at this stage, they were recognized as critical to future modelling efforts.

The presentation concluded with a set of recommendations for further research and model development, setting the stage for refining how circular strategies are represented in integrated assessment models.

CIRCOMOD’s contribution to the IAMC meeting highlights the growing importance of incorporating circular economy pathways into climate mitigation scenarios, and reflects the project’s ongoing commitment to collaborative, evidence-based modelling for a sustainable European economy.