Decarbonization Modeling of Urban Mobility and the Built Environment
Submission deadline: October 2 2026, 11:59pm ET. Submit your EOI here.
Please find the relevant links below:
Summary
The Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI) is an initiative of Schmidt Sciences’ Climate Center to advance the methodological frontier of decarbonization modeling by addressing key knowledge gaps in complex interdependencies of decarbonization pathways, with an emphasis on yielding actionable insights for policy and technology deployment strategies. DEVI currently consists of five funded projects - please check our webpage for more information.
This sector-focused call solicits Expressions of Intent (EOIs) for modeling the decarbonization of urban mobility and the built environment, including relevant interdependencies such as land use, end-use electrification, and shared infrastructure, among others. Project teams may request up to USD 4 million over 5 years. Modeling efforts are expected to be anchored in multiple and diverse city contexts, particularly urban areas that will drive emissions in the near-to-mid term, but methods and insights must generalize beyond selected cities. Projects are expected to be adaptable to integration with economy-wide models, particularly those within current DEVI projects. We are seeking to fund one multi-institutional collaboration targeting coupled representation of mobility and buildings sectors, particularly in urban systems, and addressing four focus areas: a) advances in the understanding of interdependencies in decarbonization pathways; b) methodological advances that improve model representation of said interdependencies; c) rigorous uncertainty analyses and model validation; and d) generating context-specific insights highlighting the needs, constraints and impacts of decarbonization pathways.
Motivation
The goal of DEVI is to support transformative research that advances the state of the art in computational models in order to accurately represent and evaluate energy transition pathways and their varied needs and impacts. This funding effort is motivated by the limitations of current modeling paradigms in capturing complex interdependencies between the energy system and its human and natural contexts that influence the implementation of decarbonization strategies. Urban mobility and buildings are often treated as separate sectors in models, missing feedback that determines costs and feasibility of decarbonization strategies. Integrated cross-sector approaches can account for: feedbacks across sectors (e.g. electrification in mobility and buildings and implications for shared grid infrastructure) and within sectors (e.g. climate-driven demand for cooling may lead to urban heat islands which further drives cooling demand); behavioral heterogeneity and nonlinear adoption (e.g. of electric vehicles or transit use or building retrofits) due to policies or peer effects; resource constraints and dynamics (e.g. materials availability determines embodied carbon, land use determines travel patterns and transit use); equity issues such as access to infrastructure (e.g. transit, housing) and exposure to pollution that lead to hidden costs of decarbonization; and sources of deep uncertainty such as climate extremes.
Expressions of Intent
We are seeking brief (3 page) expressions of intent (EOIs) for research projects that target key gaps in understanding and representing complex interdependencies in decarbonization of urban mobility and built environment, with an emphasis on models and analyses that are relevant for informing decision making. EOI submissions must explain how the proposed methodological advances will enable progress towards improved understanding of the needs and impacts of various decarbonization pathways. Submissions must also indicate how this improved understanding will be useful, demonstrating relevance for policy and industry action. Selected EOI submissions will be invited to submit a full proposal.
Submissions must be grounded in each of the following four goals:
1) Advances in the understanding of nonlinear dynamics, feedback, and tipping points in adoption and scaling, behavioral and institutional dynamics, and resource constraints and impacts in the context of decarbonization. Examples of topics include (but are not limited to):
Nonlinear adoption of EVs, building retrofits, transit use, and clean end-use technologies, capturing heterogeneity across stakeholders, and feedbacks across electricity supply, technology networks and infrastructure investment.
Infrastructure constraints across sectors including grid capacity, land use, and the role of distributed energy systems.
Demand-driven scenarios where energy service demand evolves endogenously with income, climate, and network effects.
Urban heat island and extreme events driving nonlinear changes in energy demand and peak loads, and influencing infrastructure risk, technology choices, siting and investment decisions, and long-run system planning under uncertainty.
Distributional dynamics such as unequal access to capital and infrastructure shaping adoption or uneven cost burdens of air or water pollution that shape policy support.
2) Advances in developing novel methodologies or in novel applications of existing methods that improve model representation of the interdependencies outlined above. Modeling efforts are encouraged to draw from a range of disciplines such as transport modeling, building science, urban economics, power systems, complex systems, finance, and machine learning —especially where new coupling strategies across urban mobility and buildings are required to co-simulate the sectors. Projects may include (but not be limited to):
Agent-based adoption or diffusion models that represent peer or network effects and capture heterogeneous behavior, demonstrating how different behavioral or policy assumptions alter adoption pathways.
Hybrid models that blend engineering-based simulation with machine learning-based approaches, explicitly addressing data gaps and uncertainties.
Scalable approaches for modeling both embodied carbon and operational carbon emissions.
Network-based or system dynamics approaches that model interdependent networks and institutional pipelines (permitting, interconnections) to analyze where targeted interventions trigger rapid scaling and how constraints propagate across sectors.
Coupled climate-urban energy models such as those linking urban heat islands to building energy use, outage risk, and investment decisions, capturing interactions that shift long-run decarbonization trajectories.
3) Rigorous uncertainty analysis and validation
Projects must tackle uncertainty arising from technology costs and performance, behavior and policy durability, climate impacts, macro disruptions, and implementation realities. We encourage:
Assessment of structural and parametric uncertainties
Deep uncertainty exploration
Data assimilation strategies that account for data quality, privacy, and interoperability, with clearly defined validation metrics and data sources.
4) Generating context specific insights aligned with decisionmaking needs, including socioeconomic constraints, policy landscapes, and distributional impacts of decarbonization.
Projects may identify: stakeholder engagement required in the model development process to ensure practical utility and effective communication strategies that translate model outputs to strategic guidance for decision-making. EOIs should explain how outputs will support real decisions—e.g., evaluate transit and land-use policies with realistic adoption and political feasibility; or quantify co-benefits/tradeoffs of decarbonization: air quality, heat exposure, mobility access, displacement risk, material demand.
Crafting your proposal
We welcome coupled urban systems project proposals that explicitly integrate mobility and buildings sectors within a budget of USD 4,000,000 over 5 years. EOI submissions should provide a 3-page project proposal (figures included), and a separate references document, using this template:
Project narrative
The urban mobility/buildings context(s): decarbonization needs, constraints, and plausible pathways
The knowledge gaps in representing key interdependencies and why they matter
Why the proposed methods will produce better, decision-relevant insights
Research plan
Key goals, hypotheses, and proposed methodological innovations
Data (including likely sources and interoperability plan) and computational needs
Pathway to generating contextual insights
How the proposed project could be used to inform decarbonization decision-making, management, investment, or policy and who the decision-makers are (e.g., city agencies, utilities)
Project team and partnerships (anonymized in the EOI)
Describe required expertise and collaboration structure without names/affiliations
Explain the team’s capacity to run a multi-institutional consortium and manage shared data/model artifacts
Preliminary budget (up to USD 4M total / 5 years)
1–2 sentences specifying major cost categories (personnel, data, compute, stakeholder engagement, etc.)
Additional considerations
Diversity in team composition: We encourage disciplinary, geographic, and demographic diversity, and opportunities for early-career researchers.
Open methods and FAIR outputs: We expect open-source code, transparent assumptions, reproducible pipelines, and timely open data releases where permissible.
Coordination among awardees: Projects should be designed to interoperate with other projects, particularly those funded through DEVI and share common interfaces where feasible.
Connections to real policy/industry decisions: Realistic and detailed stakeholder engagement plans are strongly encouraged.
Who should apply
Consortiums of multiple institutions are encouraged, particularly including or led by researchers local to selected geographic contexts. Eligible institutions include universities, national labs, institutes, non-profits, and agencies (including government or government-funded, subject to legal requirements). For-profit partners may participate as subawardees, at the option of the lead institution, but cannot receive funding directly (or earmarked) from Schmidt Sciences. Single-institution applications are unlikely to be funded.
Submission Guidelines
To be considered for funding, proposals should adhere to the following guidelines:
Page Limit: Proposals should not exceed 3 pages, including figures.
Anonymization: Please do not include any PI, team, and partner names and affiliations in the EOI document. Team member names and affiliations will be collected separately from the proposal document.
Formatting: In English, submitted as a pdf, no more than 3 pages of body text typed in single-spaced 10-point (or larger) font with 1-inch margins.
Citations: Vancouver reference style (numbered). References should be listed in an additional document uploaded separately.
Submission and Questions: Please submit your EOI here. Please reach out to energy@schmidtsciences.org with any questions and write “DEVI Sector-focused Call for EOIs” in the email subject line. Responses to frequently asked questions about this request for EOIs can be found here.
Deadline: October 2 2026, 11.59pm ET.
Award Process:
EOIs will be anonymized (removing names and references) for a blinded evaluation by a
committee of advisors and Schmidt Sciences. We intend to notify all applicants of the status of their application by November 30. At that point, we will extend an invitation to select teams to write a full proposal (8 pages) including more detail regarding budgets, project operations, timelines and team composition. Invited teams will have roughly 90 days to submit a full proposal. We expect to select one project through this sector-focused call.
Schmidt Sciences’ Climate Center:
Schmidt Sciences’ Climate Center aims to advance fundamental science to understand the implications of climate change mitigation strategies and to ensure that such planning takes into account feedback and constraints across the land, atmosphere, and oceans. It seeks to improve the state of knowledge for understanding the interactions between industrial civilization and the Earth system, and to inform decision-making and priority-setting at multiple levels, from scientific communities to civil society to industry to policymakers. Our programs enable the creation of datasets, models, platforms, and collaborations that are rigorous and trustworthy, openly available, accessible, and useful to an international community, and foster a diverse, global, transdisciplinary climate science community that rises to the challenge of imagining and building a sustainable future. In addition to the Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI), the other Virtual Institutes are: the Virtual Earth Systems Research Institute (VESRI), the Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute (OBVI), the Virtual Institute for the Carbon Cycle (VICC), and the Virtual Institute for Earth’s Water (VIEW). Virtual Institutes are high-risk, high-impact international networks intentionally formed to pursue timely opportunities to significantly increase our knowledge of the interactions between industrial civilization and the Earth system and apply it for the positive benefit of science or society.
DEVI - Urban Mobility/Buildings
Decarbonization Modeling of Urban Mobility and the Built Environment
Submission deadline: October 2 2026, 11:59pm ET. Submit your EOI here.
Please find the relevant links below:
Summary
The Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI) is an initiative of Schmidt Sciences’ Climate Center to advance the methodological frontier of decarbonization modeling by addressing key knowledge gaps in complex interdependencies of decarbonization pathways, with an emphasis on yielding actionable insights for policy and technology deployment strategies. DEVI currently consists of five funded projects - please check our webpage for more information.
This sector-focused call solicits Expressions of Intent (EOIs) for modeling the decarbonization of urban mobility and the built environment, including relevant interdependencies such as land use, end-use electrification, and shared infrastructure, among others. Project teams may request up to USD 4 million over 5 years. Modeling efforts are expected to be anchored in multiple and diverse city contexts, particularly urban areas that will drive emissions in the near-to-mid term, but methods and insights must generalize beyond selected cities. Projects are expected to be adaptable to integration with economy-wide models, particularly those within current DEVI projects. We are seeking to fund one multi-institutional collaboration targeting coupled representation of mobility and buildings sectors, particularly in urban systems, and addressing four focus areas: a) advances in the understanding of interdependencies in decarbonization pathways; b) methodological advances that improve model representation of said interdependencies; c) rigorous uncertainty analyses and model validation; and d) generating context-specific insights highlighting the needs, constraints and impacts of decarbonization pathways.
Motivation
The goal of DEVI is to support transformative research that advances the state of the art in computational models in order to accurately represent and evaluate energy transition pathways and their varied needs and impacts. This funding effort is motivated by the limitations of current modeling paradigms in capturing complex interdependencies between the energy system and its human and natural contexts that influence the implementation of decarbonization strategies. Urban mobility and buildings are often treated as separate sectors in models, missing feedback that determines costs and feasibility of decarbonization strategies. Integrated cross-sector approaches can account for: feedbacks across sectors (e.g. electrification in mobility and buildings and implications for shared grid infrastructure) and within sectors (e.g. climate-driven demand for cooling may lead to urban heat islands which further drives cooling demand); behavioral heterogeneity and nonlinear adoption (e.g. of electric vehicles or transit use or building retrofits) due to policies or peer effects; resource constraints and dynamics (e.g. materials availability determines embodied carbon, land use determines travel patterns and transit use); equity issues such as access to infrastructure (e.g. transit, housing) and exposure to pollution that lead to hidden costs of decarbonization; and sources of deep uncertainty such as climate extremes.
Expressions of Intent
We are seeking brief (3 page) expressions of intent (EOIs) for research projects that target key gaps in understanding and representing complex interdependencies in decarbonization of urban mobility and built environment, with an emphasis on models and analyses that are relevant for informing decision making. EOI submissions must explain how the proposed methodological advances will enable progress towards improved understanding of the needs and impacts of various decarbonization pathways. Submissions must also indicate how this improved understanding will be useful, demonstrating relevance for policy and industry action. Selected EOI submissions will be invited to submit a full proposal.
Submissions must be grounded in each of the following four goals:
1) Advances in the understanding of nonlinear dynamics, feedback, and tipping points in adoption and scaling, behavioral and institutional dynamics, and resource constraints and impacts in the context of decarbonization. Examples of topics include (but are not limited to):
Nonlinear adoption of EVs, building retrofits, transit use, and clean end-use technologies, capturing heterogeneity across stakeholders, and feedbacks across electricity supply, technology networks and infrastructure investment.
Infrastructure constraints across sectors including grid capacity, land use, and the role of distributed energy systems.
Demand-driven scenarios where energy service demand evolves endogenously with income, climate, and network effects.
Urban heat island and extreme events driving nonlinear changes in energy demand and peak loads, and influencing infrastructure risk, technology choices, siting and investment decisions, and long-run system planning under uncertainty.
Distributional dynamics such as unequal access to capital and infrastructure shaping adoption or uneven cost burdens of air or water pollution that shape policy support.
2) Advances in developing novel methodologies or in novel applications of existing methods that improve model representation of the interdependencies outlined above. Modeling efforts are encouraged to draw from a range of disciplines such as transport modeling, building science, urban economics, power systems, complex systems, finance, and machine learning —especially where new coupling strategies across urban mobility and buildings are required to co-simulate the sectors. Projects may include (but not be limited to):
Agent-based adoption or diffusion models that represent peer or network effects and capture heterogeneous behavior, demonstrating how different behavioral or policy assumptions alter adoption pathways.
Hybrid models that blend engineering-based simulation with machine learning-based approaches, explicitly addressing data gaps and uncertainties.
Scalable approaches for modeling both embodied carbon and operational carbon emissions.
Network-based or system dynamics approaches that model interdependent networks and institutional pipelines (permitting, interconnections) to analyze where targeted interventions trigger rapid scaling and how constraints propagate across sectors.
Coupled climate-urban energy models such as those linking urban heat islands to building energy use, outage risk, and investment decisions, capturing interactions that shift long-run decarbonization trajectories.
3) Rigorous uncertainty analysis and validation
Projects must tackle uncertainty arising from technology costs and performance, behavior and policy durability, climate impacts, macro disruptions, and implementation realities. We encourage:
Assessment of structural and parametric uncertainties
Deep uncertainty exploration
Data assimilation strategies that account for data quality, privacy, and interoperability, with clearly defined validation metrics and data sources.
4) Generating context specific insights aligned with decisionmaking needs, including socioeconomic constraints, policy landscapes, and distributional impacts of decarbonization.
Projects may identify: stakeholder engagement required in the model development process to ensure practical utility and effective communication strategies that translate model outputs to strategic guidance for decision-making. EOIs should explain how outputs will support real decisions—e.g., evaluate transit and land-use policies with realistic adoption and political feasibility; or quantify co-benefits/tradeoffs of decarbonization: air quality, heat exposure, mobility access, displacement risk, material demand.
Crafting your proposal
We welcome coupled urban systems project proposals that explicitly integrate mobility and buildings sectors within a budget of USD 4,000,000 over 5 years. EOI submissions should provide a 3-page project proposal (figures included), and a separate references document, using this template:
Project narrative
The urban mobility/buildings context(s): decarbonization needs, constraints, and plausible pathways
The knowledge gaps in representing key interdependencies and why they matter
Why the proposed methods will produce better, decision-relevant insights
Research plan
Key goals, hypotheses, and proposed methodological innovations
Data (including likely sources and interoperability plan) and computational needs
Pathway to generating contextual insights
How the proposed project could be used to inform decarbonization decision-making, management, investment, or policy and who the decision-makers are (e.g., city agencies, utilities)
Project team and partnerships (anonymized in the EOI)
Describe required expertise and collaboration structure without names/affiliations
Explain the team’s capacity to run a multi-institutional consortium and manage shared data/model artifacts
Preliminary budget (up to USD 4M total / 5 years)
1–2 sentences specifying major cost categories (personnel, data, compute, stakeholder engagement, etc.)
Additional considerations
Diversity in team composition: We encourage disciplinary, geographic, and demographic diversity, and opportunities for early-career researchers.
Open methods and FAIR outputs: We expect open-source code, transparent assumptions, reproducible pipelines, and timely open data releases where permissible.
Coordination among awardees: Projects should be designed to interoperate with other projects, particularly those funded through DEVI and share common interfaces where feasible.
Connections to real policy/industry decisions: Realistic and detailed stakeholder engagement plans are strongly encouraged.
Who should apply
Consortiums of multiple institutions are encouraged, particularly including or led by researchers local to selected geographic contexts. Eligible institutions include universities, national labs, institutes, non-profits, and agencies (including government or government-funded, subject to legal requirements). For-profit partners may participate as subawardees, at the option of the lead institution, but cannot receive funding directly (or earmarked) from Schmidt Sciences. Single-institution applications are unlikely to be funded.
Submission Guidelines
To be considered for funding, proposals should adhere to the following guidelines:
Page Limit: Proposals should not exceed 3 pages, including figures.
Anonymization: Please do not include any PI, team, and partner names and affiliations in the EOI document. Team member names and affiliations will be collected separately from the proposal document.
Formatting: In English, submitted as a pdf, no more than 3 pages of body text typed in single-spaced 10-point (or larger) font with 1-inch margins.
Citations: Vancouver reference style (numbered). References should be listed in an additional document uploaded separately.
Submission and Questions: Please submit your EOI here. Please reach out to energy@schmidtsciences.org with any questions and write “DEVI Sector-focused Call for EOIs” in the email subject line. Responses to frequently asked questions about this request for EOIs can be found here.
Deadline: October 2 2026, 11.59pm ET.
Award Process:
EOIs will be anonymized (removing names and references) for a blinded evaluation by a
committee of advisors and Schmidt Sciences. We intend to notify all applicants of the status of their application by November 30. At that point, we will extend an invitation to select teams to write a full proposal (8 pages) including more detail regarding budgets, project operations, timelines and team composition. Invited teams will have roughly 90 days to submit a full proposal. We expect to select one project through this sector-focused call.
Schmidt Sciences’ Climate Center:
Schmidt Sciences’ Climate Center aims to advance fundamental science to understand the implications of climate change mitigation strategies and to ensure that such planning takes into account feedback and constraints across the land, atmosphere, and oceans. It seeks to improve the state of knowledge for understanding the interactions between industrial civilization and the Earth system, and to inform decision-making and priority-setting at multiple levels, from scientific communities to civil society to industry to policymakers. Our programs enable the creation of datasets, models, platforms, and collaborations that are rigorous and trustworthy, openly available, accessible, and useful to an international community, and foster a diverse, global, transdisciplinary climate science community that rises to the challenge of imagining and building a sustainable future. In addition to the Decarbonization and Energy Virtual Institute (DEVI), the other Virtual Institutes are: the Virtual Earth Systems Research Institute (VESRI), the Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute (OBVI), the Virtual Institute for the Carbon Cycle (VICC), and the Virtual Institute for Earth’s Water (VIEW). Virtual Institutes are high-risk, high-impact international networks intentionally formed to pursue timely opportunities to significantly increase our knowledge of the interactions between industrial civilization and the Earth system and apply it for the positive benefit of science or society.