What are the benefits of stringent climate mitigation policy? How are the benefits of action on climate change distributed? What emission reduction pathways are consistent with avoiding certain level of global climate change?What are the consequences of various climate change policies for climate change impacts? How robust are the answers to these questions to uncertainties?
These are some of the questions that we are addressing with the Community Integrated Assessment System (CIAS). CIAS was developed by a Tyndall Centre team led by Rachel Warren. It is a unique framework for linking together computer codes written at different institutions in different computer languages, which now appears as a prizewinning publication in the Journal of Environmental Modelling and Software. It is based on the bespoke framework generator (BFG), a technology developed at the University of Manchester by Rupert Ford and others. It also contains a special facility to analyse modelling uncertainties, developed by Robin Hankin at the University of Cambridge. The system is accessed by a private SoftIAM or CIAS web portal developed at the University of East Anglia. A separate public web portal, CLIMASCOPE, is also being developed.
CIAS and CLIMASCOPE are developed and applied to produce policy relevant results in consultation with stakeholders, in particular DEFRA and DECC through the AVOID project, of which Rachel is the Tyndall Centre lead, and also World Wildlife Fund through the Wallace Initiative.
CIAS was initially funded by the Tyndall Centre and additional funding has now been obtained from OMII-UK
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