EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Large-scale scenarios as ‘boundary conditions’: A cross-impact balance simulated annealing (CIBSA) approach

Eric Kemp-Benedict (e.j.kemp-benedict@leeds.ac.uk), Henrik Carlsen and Sivan Kartha

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2019, vol. 143, issue C, 55-63

Abstract: There is increasing interest in cross-scale scenario development, driven in part by developments in climate scenarios. Climate mitigation and adaptation studies have long emphasized the link between global change and local action, and recent climate community scenarios have been developed with cross-scale application in mind. Conceptually, global scenarios have been proposed as ‘boundary conditions’ on regional and local scenarios. However, while the concept is compelling, to date we have found only one formal proposal (by Schweizer and Kurniawan) of what it might mean from a scenario development perspective. That proposal used cross-impact balances (CIB), which offer a promising route to formalization of cross-scale scenario analysis. In this paper we also apply CIB, but allow for weak, rather than zero, cross-scale interactions. We formalize the concept of weak interactions by extending CIB analysis to allow for metastable states, which are stable under small disturbances. We propose an algorithm for identifying metastable states and for combining states that become connected when small disturbances are present. Arguing that large-scale scenarios can be applied as boundary conditions when they are metastable under the influence of processes at smaller scales, we demonstrate how a simplified CIB can replace a full multi-scale CIB when a metastable scenario kernel is adopted at large scale.

Keywords: CIB; Cross-scale; Boundary condition; Metastability; Simulated annealing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162518306413
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:143:y:2019:i:c:p:55-63

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2019.03.006

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:143:y:2019:i:c:p:55-63