Abstract
Efforts to estimate the physical and economic impacts of future climate change face substantial challenges. To enrich the currently popular approaches to impact analysis—which involve evaluation of a damage function or multi-model comparisons based on a limited number of standardized scenarios—we propose integrating a geospatially resolved physical representation of impacts into a coupled human-Earth system modeling framework. Large internationally coordinated exercises cannot easily respond to new policy targets and the implementation of standard scenarios across models, institutions and research communities can yield inconsistent estimates. Here, we argue for a shift toward the use of a self-consistent integrated modeling framework to assess climate impacts, and discuss ways the integrated assessment modeling community can move in this direction. We then demonstrate the capabilities of such a modeling framework by conducting a multi-sectoral assessment of climate impacts under a range of consistent and integrated economic and climate scenarios that are responsive to new policies and business expectations.
Highlights
Efforts to estimate the physical and economic impacts of future climate change face substantial challenges
Because state-of-the-art Earth system models (ESMs) are computationally expensive, a coupled human-Earth system (CHES) model can be built by coupling a human system model to a simplified model of the climate system and to specific impact models for key ecosystems and sectors of the economy (Fig. 1)
Other strategies include improving the representation of the Earth system in integrated assessment models (IAMs) or improving the representation of societal elements within ESMs
Summary
Efforts to estimate the physical and economic impacts of future climate change face substantial challenges. The US EPA and other government agencies use these estimates to evaluate the climate benefits of rulemakings[2] This approach has attracted criticism[6,7] as the existing literature offers sparse theoretical support and provides scant empirical evidence for a specification of economic damages, especially at temperatures outside the historical range. Major efforts have been pursued toward the development of consistent modeling frameworks to assess climate impacts using a new generation of IAM, which place a greater emphasis on representing the coupled human-Earth system (CHES) model—essentially IAM version 2.0. The aim is to provide a tight integration among three communities that, though internally collaborative, have remained largely isolated from one another: the IAM, the Earth
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