Societal Transformations in Models for Energy and Climate Policy : The Ambitious Next Step

Summary, in English

Whether and how long-term energy and climate targets can be reached depend on a range of interlinked factors: technology, economy, environment, policy, and society at large. Integrated assessment models of climate change or energy-system models have limited representations of societal transformations, such as behavior of various actors, transformation dynamics in time, and heterogeneity across and within societies. After reviewing the state of the art, we propose a research agenda to guide experiments to integrate more insights from social sciences into models: (1) map and assess societal assumptions in existing models, (2) conduct empirical research on generalizable and quantifiable patterns to be integrated into models, and (3) build and extensively validate modified or new models. Our proposed agenda offers three benefits: interdisciplinary learning between modelers and social scientists, improved models with a more complete representation of multifaceted reality, and identification of new and more effective solutions to energy and climate challenges.

• Author: Evelina Trutnevyte; Léon F. Hirt; Nico Bauer; Aleh Cherp; Adam Hawkes; Oreane Y. Edelenbosch; Simona Pedde; Detlef P. van Vuuren
• Department/s: The International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics
• Publishing year: 2019-12-20
• Language: English
• Pages: 423-433
• Publication/Series: One Earth
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 4
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.12.002
• Document type: Journal article review
• Publisher: Cell Press
• Topic: Other Social Sciences
• Keywords: climate change; energy system models; integrated assessment models; social sciences and humanities; societal transformations
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 2590-3330