Countries around the world have set ambitious climate targets. The challenge now is turning those ambitions into realistic, implementable pathways that reflect national priorities, development objectives, and local realities.
The Pathways Designer is a decision-support tool that helps countries design and assess long-term pathways to net zero. Built on more than a decade of experience from the Deep Decarbonization Pathways (DDP) initiative, it combines qualitative narratives, quantitative analysis, and stakeholder dialogue to support the development of credible, country-owned transition pathways.
Unlike conventional emissions calculators, the Pathways Designer does more than estimate future emissions. It helps users explore how transformations can happen in practice, identify the key drivers of change across sectors, test alternative strategies, and understand the implications of different policy choices.
Designed to work in a wide range of national contexts—including those with limited modelling capacity—the tool supports governments, research teams, and development partners in building pathways that are not only ambitious, but grounded in the economic, social, and institutional realities of implementation.
Whether used as a standalone pathway design tool or alongside more sophisticated models, the Pathways Designer provides a structured framework for turning climate ambition into actionable strategies for long-term transformation.
A practical tool to design credible, country-specific decarbonization pathways. The tool allows capturing insights from domestic experts and stakeholders, synthetize them in structured qualitative storylines and translate them in quantified metrics.A practical tool to design credible, country-specific decarbonization pathways. The tool allows capturing insights from domestic experts and stakeholders, synthetize them in structured qualitative storylines and translate them in quantified metrics.
It bridges the gap between climate targets and implementable strategies, helping translate ambition into detailed pathways connecting the short-term with long-term goals, and informing concrete decisions with robust evidence anchored in the reality of each country. It does so by adopting a detailed sectoral breakdown and describing the key drivers of concrete transformations compatible with ambitious climate targets and domestic socio-economic priorities
It covers all major emitting sectors, including:
It is not just a calculator—it is a decision-support tool designed to help countries build realistic and implementable pathways to net zero.
Beyond calculating emissions, the Designer supports policy discussions by:
The objective is not simply to calculate emissions trajectories, but to support informed decisions about how a country’s transition can be achieved in practice.
National research teams, government analysts, and expert partners working on climate strategy and planning.
No. The tool is designed to be accessible, with different levels of complexity depending on user needs.
Yes.
The Pathways Designer can be used as a complementary tool alongside more complex modelling approaches. It helps structure and compare transition pathways, define key assumptions, and develop coherent scenarios that can subsequently be assessed using detailed energy system, macroeconomic, or sectoral models.
At the same time, in contexts where such models are not available—or where modelling capacity and data are limited—the Designer enables teams to develop robust pathway analyses without requiring more sophisticated analytical tools.
This flexibility makes it suitable both as:
The Designer relies primarily on national data gathered and consolidated by the country team from existing sources such as official statistics, sectoral databases, policy documents, and research studies. The DDP provides benchmarks and international references to help inform assumptions, validate results, and address data gaps where needed. The amount and nature of required data depends on the choices made by the user regarding the granularity of the representation for each component of the pathway
Countries have targets, but often lack practical tools to design implementable pathways, especially in low-capacity contexts.
Particularly suited for:
Highly scalable:
The value of the DDP Designer is not to replace existing models, but to help countries design credible and implementable pathways that can inform policy and investment decisions.
By combining country ownership, stakeholder engagement, qualitative narratives, and quantitative analysis, it provides a concrete tool to equip countries with the capacity to understand how the transition can realistically be achieved in a specific national context.
As such it addresses a critical gap that many modelling tools leave unanswered. It can work complementarily with existing models by ensuring that models are used to inform a story that would be primarily designed according to a policy vision instead of using models to tell the story by themselves
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