Integrated Assessment models are being accused of being unaccessible – that they are impenetrable black boxes, full of assumptions and guesses. Recognizing that this image reduces people’s trust in IAMs and therefore inhibits their use as decision making tools. WorldTrans wants to address this issue.
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Climate change full blown
Climate change is here, it is felt in most parts of the world. The most important cause is usage of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas), the most direct consequence is global warming, and the indirect consequences are diverse and costly: dangers to infrastructure due to extreme precipitation and land/snow slides, dangers to water and food access due to extreme weather and too much or too little water. Sea level change is already dangerously affecting some low-lying areas. The list of impacts that are already felt is long and heartbreaking.
The urgency to combat climate change is well recognized by the the research communities and policymakers alike. The most recent climate summit, in Glasgow in 2021 (COP 26), “expresses alarm and utmost concern that human activities have caused around 1.1 °C of warming to date, that impacts are already being felt in every region and that carbon budgets consistent with achieving the Paris Agreement temperature goal are now small and being rapidly depleted”’ and “stresses the urgency of enhancing ambition and action in relation to mitigation, adaptation and finance in this critical decade to address the gaps in the implementation of the goals of the Paris Agreement”.
Best ways to tackle climate change
Working out the best ways to tackle climate change is one of the key challenges facing policymakers both today and in the decades ahead. To inform these decisions, scientists and economists have developed a suite of tools known as “integrated assessment models” (IAMs). IAMs are designed to help us understand how human development and societal choices affect each other and the natural world, including climate change. They are “integrated” because they combine different strands of knowledge to model human society alongside the natural Earth system. The IAMs are used as decisionmaking tools, to gain insight into the variety of questions that arise when debating mitigation and adaptation options. They can be used to answer central questions about climate change, from how the world could avoid 1.5C of global warming given assumptions like “at the lowest cost” or “without the use of nuclear power”.
From weak and unaccessible to used and trusted
IAMs are by some accused of being unaccessible – that they are impenetrable black boxes, full of assumptions and guesses. Recognizing that this image reduces people’s trust in IAMs and therefore inhibits their use as decision making tools, the EU Horizon Program has recently put forward calls for proposals to make “Improvement of Integrated Assessment Models in support of climate policies” with the aim to “improve the state-of-the-art of IAMs by tackling their existing weaknesses and lack of/limited capabilities of the current generation of models in order to provide robust, credible and transparent evidence-base in support of design and evaluation of multiscale (global, European, national, regional) mitigation policies at various time horizons”.
A consortium led by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway) made a successful bid to this call, with their proposal “ WORLDTRANS – TRANSPARENT ASSESSMENTS FOR REAL PEOPLE”.
One potential response to the call could have been to generate more detailed IAMs. However, we argued that this approach – creating ever-more complex and elaborate process-based integrated assessment models – is not fundamentally addressing the existing and well-documented weaknesses of IAMs.
People and climate are unpredictable
The WorldTrans team has responded to the EU challenge by responding to these weaknesses of current IAMS: they generally assume that humans, societies and the economies behave rationally; they usually do not include feedbacks from nature to humans (which is clearly a bad assumption now that climate change is observed all over the world) and there is limited uptake of results and involvement of citizens and stakeholders.
Our working hypothesis is that the larger, structural, deficiencies in current state-of-the-art IAMs – including the limited level of feedbacks between climate change processes, societies and human behaviour and the techno-energy-economy domains – need to be addressed to reach significant, rather than incremental, improvements in IAMs. In doing so, we sacrifice details of any particular sector or process, instead capturing the essences of their functions in order to focus on how those processes affect each other within and across domains. WorldTrans will examine existing weaknesses and limitations of current IAMs; it will use system dynamics methods and modelling to deal transparently with multiscale issues and policy response options; and “bridge gaps” between models, experts, and user communities. We wish to create a prototype for an assessment method that functions for “real people”.
The WorldTrans team consists of scientists from the Universities of Leeds, Hamburg, Radbaud, Bergen, Potsdam, Stockholm, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Kristiania University College in Oslo, in addition to MET Norway.
FRIDA is born
There are four domains that need to be linked in our simple IAM called FRIDA: the economic system, the human societies, the food production domain and the natural climate system. What connects all are the Earth’s carbon, energy (solar) and water cycles. MET Norway, Leeds and Max Planck institute will take the lead on the the natural climate domain of FRIDA, IIASA, Radbaud and Potsdam will take the lead on the human and societal domains; Kristiania will take the lead on implementing an economic component for a system in transition; The impacts of climate on humans primarily go through extreme and changing weather, and this development will be led by the University of Hamburg. Stockholm and Potsdam will make that connection through the agricultural sector. Bringing all the domains together and leading the development of FRIDA will be the University of Bergen who is Europe’ leading educational center for System Dynamics (link). And using this model and creating a new prototype for “assessments for real people” will be Stockholm Resilience Center and MET Norway.
The objectives of the project is threefold: 1) To build new communities of IAM experts and users (citizens and stakeholders alike), based on a transparent approach to integrated assessments; 2) To unpack and quantify the potential importance of including heterogeneous human behaviour in IAMs; 3) To identify main feedback loops and policy leverage points for climate-neutrality oriented policies.
At the meta-level, it is our ambition that our prototype assessment method is taken up and used widely, because it is a method for integrated assessment that is likely to create more traction and therefore more easily lead Europe on the path towards climate neutrality in 2050 (the European Green Deal)
FACT; WorldTrans is funded through EU Horizon, 5 million Euro, for four years (2023-2026). We will engage seven young recruits, including two PhD candidates (Kristiania and IIASA), and a world class team of senior scientists.