Integrated Frameworks

... innovating integrated assessment systems

Projects: CIAS - A Community Integrated Assessment System. Project Leader: Dr Rachel Warren, University of East Anglia

The aim of the 'Community Integrated Assessment System' (CIAS) is to develop, maintain and apply a novel distributed community integrated assessment system which has scientific credibility, policy relevance and integrative analytical power. The specific objectives are:

• to work with the GENIE consortium to ensure that CIAS has access to state-of-the-art intermediate complexity representations of the Earth System, and with the Hadley Centre to include their FAMOUS model in the CIAS's climate model portfolio;

• to include new modules representing global-scale and distributed impacts of climate change on natural and social systems along with other programmes and external collaborators, and to ensure feedbacks from these impacts with the climate system and with the global economy are represented dynamically in CIAS;

• to use CIAS to undertake a multi-criteria analysis of the implications of alternative stabilisation scenarios as an alternative to conventional monetised cost-benefit analysis and as a way of providing a wider and better treatment of the uncertainties;

• to explore using CIAS, the opportunities for sustainable development presented by the switch to low-carbon technologies.

E3MG - An Energy Economy Environment Model. Project Leader: Dr Terry Barker, University of Cambridge

This Project will upgrade the energyenvironment- economy (E3) global model (E3MG) and ensure that it can adequately represent induced technological change and diffusion via trade, FDI and information, allowing options for electricity generation (e.g. micro-CHP, renewables, carbon capture, and nuclear). The task extends to the integration of E3MG into CIAS so that the economic drivers of GHG emissions can be represented in stabilization scenarios. The work will enable supporting quantitative analysis of the effect of different international policy regimes on foreign direct investment, spillovers, technological change and growth, and technological diffusion.