Climate Action for Decarbonization: The Case of a Subnational Government in Brazil

The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions must be accelerated. Countries that are signatories to the Paris Agreement must propose their nationally determined contributions and develop decarbonization strategies to achieve conditional targets. In this paper, we identify a gap between these strategies and the capacity of governments to execute them. We use design science to structure this problem and apply Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) methodology to identify strategic objectives and to define prioritization criteria for the proposed actions. We then combine this with the Soft System Methodology (SSM) to identify alternative means to achieve net zero. We identify some critical issues that have an impact on implementing decarbonization strategies: (a) the large number of proposed actions; (b) agents affected by decarbonization actions that are not under the control of the government responsible for managing the strategy; and (c) the level of readiness of available technologies and the economic conditions for their implementation. Thus, this paper presents (1) a process to support implementing decarbonization strategies (PIMADE); (2) a combined use of the VFT and SSM methodologies for structuring problems to organize decision objectives and to establish actions for implementing strategies; and (3) an application of the proposed process at the subnational governmental level in Brazil.