Invited Speaker: Detlev van Vuuren (Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) + Wolfgang Lucht (PIK)

Global change includes social, economic and environmental drivers which in their combination affect the structure and functioning of the Earth System. Prominent examples for such drivers are human population growth, changing market prices for food and energy as well as climate change. One scientific approach to analyze the interdependencies between human activities and environmental processes is to explicitly couple macro-dynamics from various domains as numerically expressed in Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IAMs have also provided the methodological backbone to derive a new set of “representative concentration pathways” (RCPs) as commonly shared input for present and future global circulation-level Earth System model intercomparison studies. The aim of our session is twofold: (1) to present the state-of-the-art in Integrated Assessment modeling and to identify future research needs (for example, on the technological side for bringing them closer together with Earth System Models), (2) to review their potentials and limitations as scientific instruments for policy support.