Representing the Integrated Assessment of Climate Change: Adaptation and Mitigation

Models, such as the UK Hadley Centre's coupled atmospheric-ocean model, have become central to the understanding of climate change. This paper is concerned with how the overall system can best be represented, whether and how the integration has been achieved, and the problems involved in the linking together of such models with energy-environment-economy (E3) and other models. Two approaches "cause & effect" and "stocks & flows" are compared and contrasted for the representation of the system. The linked system forms an integrated assessment model of climate change, its impacts on natural systems, the effects on the socio-economic system, and the how society and the economy might adapt and/or develop policies to mitigate the climate change. The role of the models is discussed in the context of the integrated assessment. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the problems in linking the models together.