The ACHIEVE consortium will enable Switzerland’s transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by empowering key stakeholders with the knowledge, tools and strategies to define and implement science-based roadmaps for addressing hard-to-abate emissions. The project responds to all four Research Challenges of the SWEET call, aligned with the Swiss Federal Council’s Energy Strategy 2050 and Long-Term Climate Strategy. ACHIEVE employs a transdisciplinary co-design process involving societal, policy and industrial stakeholders from the start to ensure relevance and rapid implementation. ACHIEVE evaluates and implements measures to reduce emissions from hard-to-abate sectors, i.e., agriculture, waste-to-energy, cement, chemical, while accelerating the implementation of carbon capture, utilization, transport, and storage (CCUTS) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) infrastructure. Project objectives include assessing mitigation strategies, unlocking biomass and CDR potentials, advancing circular economy approaches for industrial decarbonization, and co-designing CCUTS pathways and policy frameworks. ACHIEVE pioneers pilots to demonstrate CCUTS and CDR feasibility in Switzerland, including CO2 injection in the underground and biochar-based construction materials. A Swiss-specific Integrated Assessment Model synthesizes findings to evaluate socially accepted transition pathways, integrating natural carbon pools, agri-food systems, CCUTS, CDR, and energy-economic interactions, advancing beyond current modeling approaches. ACHIEVE generates impact across three stages: generating systems knowledge on effective measures, identifying target knowledge for implementation, and designing transformation knowledge to guide policy and technological advancements. Key expected outcomes of ACHIEVE target emission reductions in the agri-food sector, cascaded sustainable biomass use, net-zero cross-sectorial industry roadmaps, a national CCUTS framework, and stakeholder perception and acceptance of trade-offs in net-zero transition pathways.
The construction sector urgently needs to reduce its substantial carbon emissions and resource consumption. Industrial buildings are often enveloped by so called sandwich panels, typically made of metal sheets and polyurethane foam that are energy-intensive and lack circularity. Furthermore, adaptations to climate change in Swiss forests leads to an enlarging proportion of deciduous trees better adapted to drought. Data from the Swiss National Forest Inventory already show the increasing amount of beech in Swiss forests. At the moment 80% of beech timber is directly burnt for energy. There exists a shortage of technical possibilities to use beech or even non-sawable beech in construction. This implementation project addresses these two challenges by advancing a novel and re-usable innovative sandwich panel made from non-sawable and residual hard wood. This implementation project aims to advance Timcelium, an innovative, fully bio-based sandwich panel, from a lab-scale prototype (TRL 5) to a pre-industrial demonstrator (TRL 7). The project will demonstrate a high-value, circular application for Swiss non-sawable and residual wood, which would otherwise be predominantly incinerated. The central innovation of Timcelium lies in its material composition, as it replaces the CO2-intensive metal and polyurethane (PU) foam layers of conventional sandwich panels.
