Assessing Greece’s plans towards climate-neutrality under a water-energy-food-emissions modelling nexus: Ambitious goals versus scattered efforts

Achieving climate-neutrality is a global imperative that demands coordinated efforts from both science and robust policies supporting a smooth transition across multiple sectors. However, the interdisciplinary and complex science-to-policy nature of this effort makes it particularly challenging for several countries. Greece has set ambitious goals across different policies; however, their progress is often debated. For the first time, we simulated a scenario representing Greece’s climate-neutrality goals drawing upon its main relevant energy, agricultural and water policies, and compared it with a ‘current accounts’ scenario by 2050. The results indicate that most individual policies have the potential to significantly reduce carbon emissions across all sectors of the economy (residential, industrial, transportation, services, agriculture, and energy production). However, their implementation seems to be based on economic and governance assumptions that often overlook sectoral interdependencies, infrastructure constraints, and social aspects, hindering progress towards a unified and more holistic sustainable transition.