Energy policy and models are too focused on decarbonisation. They leave aside other environmental impacts that must be considered to ensure sustainable energy transition pathways, such as impacts on biodiversity, raw material requirements or water and land use. In the LIVEN project we develop and adapt the environmental assessment tool ENBIOS to overcome these limitations of current energy system models.

The project is structured in four stages. During ENVISIONING, we explore the environmental assessment needs of Spanish energy policy makers and translate them into quantitative information requests that should be provided by ENBIOS. In the INNOVATION stage, we review the structure and methods of ENBIOS to transform it into a standalone tool capable of performing environmental assessments with a geographical reference. During the EVALUATION stage we test if the resulting ENBIOS configuration provides information that is actually relevant for decision making. Finally, in the PILOT phase we will chooses between two energy planing policies currently under development in Spain and Catalonia (the Spanish Integrated Energy and Climate National Plan (PNIEC) and the Catalan Energy and Climate Change Plan (PECAC)) to run a complete assessment with high resolution to enhance transfer.