An Innovative Approach to Multi-Method Integrated Assessment Modelling of Global Climate Change

Peer-Olaf Siebers (), Zhi En Lim (), Grazziela P. Figueredo () and James Hey ()
Additional contact information
Peer-Olaf Siebers: https://people.cs.nott.ac.uk/pszps/
Grazziela P. Figueredo: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/computerscience/people/grazziela.figueredo

Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, 2020, vol. 23, issue 1, 10

Abstract: Modelling and simulation play an increasingly significant role in exploratory studies for informing policy makers on climate change mitigation strategies. There is considerable research being done in creating Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which focus on examining the human impacts on climate change. Many popular IAMs are created as steady state optimisation models. They typically employ a nested structure of neoclassical production functions to represent the energy-economy system, holding aggregate views on variables, and hence are unable to capture a finer level of details of the underlying system components. An alternative approach that allows modelling populations as a collection of individual and unevenly distributed entities is Agent-Based Modelling, often used in the field of Social Simulation. But simulating huge numbers of individual entities can quickly become an issue, as it requires large amounts of computational resources. The goal of this paper is to introduce a conceptual framework for developing hybrid IAMs. This novel modelling approach allows us to reuse existing rigid, but well-established IAMs, and adds more flexibility by replacing aggregate stocks with a community of vibrant interacting entities. We provide a proof-of-concept of the application of this conceptual framework in form of an illustrative example. Our test case takes the settings of the US. It is solely created for the purpose of demonstrating our hybrid modelling approach; we do not claim that it has predictive powers.

Keywords: Integrated Assessment Modelling; Climate Change; Agent-Based Modelling; System Dynamics Modelling; Methodological Advance; Hybridisation; Scalability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.jasss.org/23/1/10/10.pdf (application/pdf)

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:jas:jasssj:2018-48-4

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation from Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesco Renzini ().