Working out the best ways to tackle climate change is one of the key challenges facing policymakers both today and in the decades ahead, and the EU has made it a priority for research. To inform these decisions, scientists and economists have developed a suite of tools known as “integrated assessment models” (IAMs). IAMs are designed to assess how choices about economic and societal development affect each other and the natural world, including climate change. Today’s IAMs are used to gain insight into questions about different climate mitigation and adaptation options, with specific economic or technological assumptions. For example, they can be used to answer questions about how the world could avoid more than 1.5C of global warming “at the lowest cost”, or “without the use of nuclear power”.
The EU challenged the research community in 2022 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”.
The WorldTrans team has responded to the EU challenge with a working hypothesis that structural weaknesses in current IAMs – including the limited representation of these important biophysical and social feedbacks – need to be addressed if researchers are to deliver significant, rather than incremental, improvements in IAMs for climate and sustainability. Our approach is to sacrifice details of particular sectors or processes, instead aiming to capture the essence of their functions to see how those processes affect each other within and across domains. WorldTrans will use system dynamics methods and modelling to deal transparently with multiscale issues and policy response options. The team will work to “bridge the gaps” between models, experts, and user communities such that integrated assessments are understandable and usable for “real people”.