Fiona Köhnke ^1* Bettina Steuri ¹ Lars Baetcke ² Malgorzata Borchers ³ Torsten Brinkmann ⁴ Roland Dittmeyer ⁵ Martin Dornheim ⁶ Juliane El Zohbi ¹ Johannes Förster ⁷ Erik Gawel ^8,9 Knut Görl ¹ Michael Herbst ¹⁰ Dominik Heß ⁵ Aram Kalhori ¹¹ Klaas Korte ⁸ Zhan Li ¹¹ Nadine Mengis ¹² Nathalie Monnerie ¹³ Andreas Oschlies ¹² Enric Prats-Salvado ^13,14 Thorsten B. Reusch ¹⁵ Imke Rhoden ¹⁶ Torsten Sachs ¹¹ Romina Schaller ¹⁷ Eva Schill ^18,5 Sonja Simon ¹⁹ Angela Stevenson ¹² Terese Thoni ^20,7 Daniela Thrän ^21,3 Mengzhu Xiao ²² Daniela Jacob ¹

• ¹ Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Hamburg, Germany
• ² Institute for Maritime Energy Systems, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Geesthacht, Hamburg, Germany
• ³ Department of Bioenergy, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ⁴ Institute for Membrane Research, Helmholtz Centre for Materials and Coastal Research (HZG), Geesthacht, Germany
• ⁵ Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany
• ⁶ University of Nottingham, Nottingham, England, United Kingdom
• ⁷ Department of Environmental Politics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ⁸ Department of Economics, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ⁹ Institute for Infrastructure and Resource Management, Faculty of Economics and Management Science, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
• ¹⁰ Agrosphere (IBG-3), Institute of Bio- and Geosciences, Julich Research Center, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
• ¹¹ GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
• ¹² Biogeochemical Modelling, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
• ¹³ German Aerospace Center (DLR), Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
• ¹⁴ RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
• ¹⁵ Marine Evolutionary Ecology, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Kiel, Germany
• ¹⁶ Institute of Energy and Climate Research, Julich Research Center, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Jülich, Germany
• ¹⁷ Department of Environmental and Planning Law, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ¹⁸ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States
• ¹⁹ German Aerospace Center (DLR), Stuttgart, Germany
• ²⁰ Centre for Environmental and Climate Research, Faculty of Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
• ²¹ Deutsches Biomasse-Forschungszentrum (DBFZ), Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany
• ²² International Renewable Energy Agency, Bonn, Germany

With the amendment to the German Climate Change Act in 2021, the Federal Government of Germany has set the target to become greenhouse gas neutral by 2045. Reaching this ambitious target requires multisectoral efforts, which in turn calls for interdisciplinary collaboration: the Net-Zero-2050 project of the Helmholtz Climate Initiative serves as an example of successful, interdisciplinary collaboration with the aim of producing valuable recommendations for action to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions in Germany. To this end, we applied an interdisciplinary approach to combining comprehensive research results from ten German national research centers in the context of carbon neutrality in Germany. In this paper, we present our approach and the method behind the interdisciplinary storylines development, which enabled us to create a common framework between different carbon dioxide removal and avoidance methods and the bigger carbon neutrality context. Thus, the research findings are aggregated into narratives: the two complementary storylines focus on technologies for net-zero CO2 emissions and on different framing conditions for implementing net-zero CO2 measures. Moreover, we outline the Net-Zero-2050 results emerging from the two storylines by presenting the resulting narratives in the context of carbon neutrality in Germany. Aiming at creating insights into how complementary and related expertise can be combined in teams across disciplines, we conclude with the project’s lessons learned. This paper sheds light on how to facilitate cooperation between different science disciplines with the purpose of preparing joint research results that can be communicated to a specific audience. Additionally, it provides further evidence that interdisciplinary and diverse research teams are an essential factor for defining solution spaces for complex, interdisciplinary problems.