Diagnostic indicators for integrated assessment models of climate policy

By Elmar Kriegler, Nils Petermann, Volker Krey, Valeria Jana Schwanitz, Gunnar Luderer, Shuichi Ashina, Valentina Bosetti, Jiyong Eom, A. Kitous, Aurélie Méjean and 5 more. 2015

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Integrated assessments of how climate policy interacts with energy-economy systems can be performed by a variety of models with different functional structures. In order to provide insights into why results differ between models, this article proposes a diagnostic scheme that can be applied to a wide range of models. Diagnostics can uncover patterns of model behavior and indicate how results differ between model types. Such insights are informative since model behavior can have a significant impact on projections of climate change mitigation costs and other policy-relevant information. The authors propose diagnostic indicators to characterize model responses to carbon price signals and test these in a diagnostic study of 11 global models. Indicators describe the magnitude of emission abatement and the associated costs relative to a harmonized baseline, the relative changes in carbon intensity and energy intensity, and the extent of transformation in the energy system. This study shows a correlation among indicators suggesting that models can be classified into groups based on common patterns of behavior in response to carbon pricing. Such a classification can help to explain variations among policy-relevant model results.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0870bacec94d98d592400ffacbb3e4b77daf3f35

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Citations in the corpus

Evaluating process-based integrated assessment models of climate change mitigation (2017, background): “This approach derives from the economist, Kaldor, who proposed ‘a stylised view of the facts’ that held when observing economic growth over long time periods, ignoring business cycles or other causes of volatility (Kaldor 1957; Leimbach et al. 2015).”
2 °C and SDGs: united they stand, divided they fall? (2016, methodology): “The AMPERE scenario work received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2014) under grant agreement No. 265 139 (AMPERE).”
Energy efficiency and economy-wide rebound effects: A review of the evidence and its implications (2021, background): “The latter remain fixed in the policy scenarios, which instead model price-induced substitution of capital for energy in response to changes in energy and carbon prices – supplemented in some cases with bottom-up modelling of fuel switching and technology improvements in individual sectors [120], an”
Long-term model-based projections of energy use and CO2 emissions from the global steel and cement industries (2016, background): “This pattern of increasing carbon tax values is common in recent model comparison and diagnostics studies (Calvin et al., 2012; Clarke et al., 2016; Kriegler et al., 2015).”
Modelling innovation and the macroeconomics of low-carbon transitions: theory, perspectives and practical use (2019, methodology): “This underpins most models used to assess energy-economy issues in the climate change community (e.g. Capros et al., 2014; Clarke et al., 2014; Kriegler et al., 2014; Kriegler et al., 2015a; Nordhaus, 2017).”
Assessment of wind and solar power in global low-carbon energy scenarios: An introduction (2017, background): “Due to differences in models’ responsiveness to the carbon price signal (Kriegler et al., 2015), the Tax30 scenarios results in different FF&I CO2 budgets and climate outcomes, ranging from 920 GtCO2 to 2500 GtCO2 over the 2000-2100 period.”
Technological Forecasting & Social Change (2014, methodology): “Finally, one of the articles in this special issue is dedicated to diagnosing the behavior of the various models employed by AMPERE (Kriegler et al., 2014b-in this issue).”
Making or breaking climate targets: : The AMPERE study on staged accession scenarios for climate policy (2015, unknown): “This can be closely linked to the responsiveness of models to carbon pricing (Table 2) and, for general equilibrium models, to the magnitude of the economic impact they project from higher energy prices [39].”
A Review of Criticisms of Integrated Assessment Models and Proposed Approaches to Address These, through the Lens of BECCS (2019, background): “The IAM teams’ response [31] addresses this criticism through pointing out that IAMs have been compared and differences classified according to a variety of key diagnostics [32].”