Climate Change and Integrated Assessment: The Tolerable Windows Approach

Abstract

Increasing concerns about the potential risks involved in anthropogenic climate change over the past ten years have boosted the intensity of research efforts on all aspects of the problem and motivated an integrated analysis of their results. This paper is intended to provide a short overview of modeling approaches to integrated assessments of climate change. It also presents an innovative concept, the Tolerable Windows Approach (TWA), as it is adopted in a new research project called Integrated Assessment of Climate Protection Strategies (ICLIPS) at PIK. The approach is based on an inverse modeling concept that derives climate stabilization objectives from perceived unacceptable impacts and produces complete sets of permitted emission paths satisfying the corresponding climate change constraints. Initial results show that the approach is a promising new direction in integrated modeling.