The MPDD Chair was born out of a diagnosis shared by the CIRED and the CMA, as well as their industrial and institutional partners, that :

  • Meeting the challenges of sustainable development requires working on future “states of the world” and identifying the points of divergence that allow or prevent their achievement. This cannot be done by simply juxtaposing the views of experts from different disciplines, intuitive conjectures and normative judgements.

  • Prospective modeling is a necessary tool to produce diverse but coherent images of the future and to support scientifically informed debates integrating inputs from engineering, economic and other social sciences.

  • Progress is needed to reflect the interdependencies between the energy sector and other key sectors of sustainable development (transport, construction, materials industry), as well as the links between climate, energy security, development and migration, changes in technical systems and consumption patterns, and the challenges of growth and employment in an open economy.

Over the past ten years, the Chair has been able to mobilize the complementary skills of its two laboratories to become an internationally recognized brand, as shown by the success of the symposia and seminars it has organized, as well as that of its publications, and the interventions of its directors in the media and in national and international circles of expertise. Today, it provides four out of the five French experts who have been selected to contribute to the Sixth Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Chair has been renewed for the period 2019-2023, reformulating its objectives as follows:

  1. Demand dynamics
  2. Tensions over resources
  3. Initiation and management of transitions
  4. International Influences

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Consolidate a lasting platform of prospective modeling tools integrating the models developed by both teams, which will be improved as they are being developed, the procedures for dialogue between these models, and a standardized synoptic table for the presentation and control of results in order to allow a more effective dialogue with the users of the scenarios produced.

Strengthening the role of the Chair as a hub of activity through the organization of annual reporting days on work in progress (two per year, including one in partnership with sponsoring partners), as well as the Chair’s seminars on the issues and policies of sustainable development. The modeling platform seminars are dedicated to in-depth technical discussions and are reserved to the Chair’s partners and their guests (subject to prior approval by the Monitoring Committee). The others are widely open to scientists, government officials, social partners and NGO representatives. They will include IPCC milestones to enable French stakeholders to grasp the reality of international debates in real time. Special sessions of these seminars will provide a forum for “prospective France” exchanges to accompany the debates on the energy transition law. They will allow a discussion of the scenarios mobilized by the administration with counterpoints provided by the scenarios of the Chair’s teams and those of other teams producing transition scenarios.

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Consolidate the role played by the Chair in high-level prospective training by funding and organizing courses dispensed through the OSE and the EEET Advanced Master’s programs.