How to assess climate change mitigation potential at project-level? An estimation based on life cycle assessment of project proposals submitted under the European Green Deal Call

With the ambition to make Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050, the European Union (EU) adopted in 2019 the European Green Deal (EGD). To finance the EGD, the EU is markedly investing in the transition towards a climate-neutral society. In this context, the present paper suggests an approach enabling the ex-ante estimation of lifetime carbon savings from investment projects. The assessment is based on the use of the Environmental Footprint (EF) method, the EU recommended Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based method to quantify the environmental impacts of products and organisations. The suggested approach is applied in a novel survey dataset, stemming from the EGD call, and aims to perform a plausibility check of the expected climate change mitigation potentials of investment projects as reported through the survey. For most of the projects assessed there are significant differences between the climate change mitigation potentials estimated by the methodology proposed in this report and the potentials reported via the survey, highlighting the need for introducing a systematic approach to assess climate change mitigation potentials consistently across different projects. Lessons learned from this assessment are reported and suggestions are provided on how to design future surveys to ensure the relevant data is collected to apply the methodology here presented. This approach could be used to systematically assess tangible and visible solutions towards the targets of the Green Deal, thus serving as a basis for recommendations of any ex-ante analysis of projects serving towards a net-zero emissions future [2].