Some Contributions of Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change

By John P. Weyant. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2017

416 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article reviews the use of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in climate policy and research at the global scale. Two different types of IAMs are discussed. First, there are models that focus on climate change mitigation options and climate change impacts in some detail without necessarily valuing or aggregating all possible impacts into a single measure of projected climate damages. Here they are called detailed process (DP) IAMs. A second class of IAMs are much more highly aggregated and focus on calculating carbon emissions trajectories and carbon prices that maximize global welfare. Here these models are referred to as aggregate benefit–cost analysis (BCA) IAMs. Early IAMs of both types were introduced about 30 years ago and by now have been applied to many important policy and research design issues. Continual advancements in physical and economic system understanding, modeling techniques, and computational power should continue to open up many additional opportunities for using these models to provide relevant information to decision makers. While the models can be improved in many areas, much of the uncertainty that exists reflects a lack of complete scientific understanding of the systems involved rather than limitations of one or another approach to model construction and use.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1b994118293f5bd1838606b1368839057106a03

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Citations in the corpus

Three green financial policies to address climate risks (2021, background): “As a matter of fact, the majority of dynamic climate-economy models restricts attention to policies expressed as monetary incentives (Clarke et al., 2009; Acemoglu et al., 2012; Golosov et al., 2014; Weyant, 2017).”
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, background): “m to people, ecosystems, and society. It is therefore essential to develop robust tools for estimating the extent and distribution of these potential harms. The ﬁeld of Integrated Assessment Modeling [602, 603] aims to map the outputs of a climate model to societal impacts, but such approaches have ”
Evaluating process-based integrated assessment models of climate change mitigation (2017, methodology): “Throughout this article, we use ‘IAMs’ to mean process-based integrated assessment models (or what Weyant (2017) calls ‘detailed process’ or DP IAMs).”