ROBUST POLICY · Developing a robust decision making framework for climate change policy under uncertainty

Developing a robust decision making framework for climate change policy under uncertainty

Climate change is affecting different aspects of life on the earth. These impacts are ranging from melting ice sheets and rising sea levels that threaten the coastal communities, to severe droughts and heatwaves that reduce agricultural output and force communities to migrate. Although the climate change is considered the greatest challenge of our generation, there are still many uncertainties about how the climate system works and interacts with other natural and human systems. These uncertainties have undermined our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as the main trigger of climate change and have disrupted the flow of information from the scientific community to policy makers and the general public. As a result, many people perceive climatic changes as anomalies in the environment. Unless the research community provide informed and robust guidelines to policy makers, this will result in inconsistent and ineffective measures that will fail to grabs the scale of climate change as the largest threat to our planet and its habitats. Therefore, the uncertainty in climate change projections can severely affect the ability of our societies to respond and adapt to the impacts of climate change. This project was designed to address the issue of uncertainty in climate change and provide a scientific approach for how to deal with these uncertainties. In particular, this project considered a holistic approach and tried to incorporate socioeconomic impacts of climate change. Uncertainties in the climate system can be modeled using integrated assessment models (IAM) by incorporating stochastic optimization techniques. In this project, the fellow aimed to address how to deal with uncertainties in the climate and human systems in two distinct ways. First, a standard IAM model of climate change and economy (DICE model) was modified to accommodate for the new and unconventional technologies that aim to reduce and eliminate the negative impacts of climate change. Geoengineering technologies including Carbon Removal Dioxide and Solar Radiative Management were considered as most prominent candidates. The uncertainty about the efficiency of these technologies were investigated and the impact on optimal mitigation policy was demonstrated. Second, the impact of climate change on population dynamic and specially on migration was investigated. Based on historical bilateral migration data, a migration probability for each group of high-skilled and low-skilled labor was established. The goal was to develop a modeling framework to account for uncertainties in socioeconomic factors that dominate migration flows and to provide robust decision making tools for analyzing climate change risks and its broader impacts.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union