"The proposed project is aiming at drawing a clear map of the effectiveness of various ongoing initiatives on climate change and energy issues, within and outside the UN framework, by focusing on governance functions and actors performing the functions, including nation states, business and industry, NGOs, scientific networks and international organizations. It further develops scenarios on mid- to long- term institutional architectures on climate and energy in view of reaching an emerging global consensus on halving global GHG emissions by 2050, and to evaluate the scenarios in terms of the amount of GHG emission reductions and their paths. In other words, this project will work on emission differentiations by using differentiation models developed through political scientific institutional scenario-making. Through this exercise, which required inter-disciplinary collaboration with emission-reduction model, environmental effectiveness of the institutions will be evaluated in comparable way. This is one of the challenges of the GAIA project, which lies in bridging the gap between studies on institutional architecture in terms of political scientific analysis and social economic and engineering models on GHG emissions reductions towards low carbon society. The project has a strong policy-orientation in Europe and Japan, both of which are the key actors in the negotiation processes on post 2012 institutional architecture on climate change as well as implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. Therefore, the results of the project, by presenting ways to enhance and link ongoing initiatives and to evaluate environmental effectiveness of them, are expected to give impacts on the actual design of post 2012 mid- to long-term institutional architecture on climate change and energy, let alone its contribution to scientific development in such disciplines as political science and international relations, and environmental policy studies."