Societal impacts and emissions pathways

Contact: Brian O'Neill
boneill@ucar.edu

The Integrated Assessment Modeling (IAM) group, within the Climate and Global Dynamics Laboratory at NCAR, develops and applies integrated models of human and earth systems to help understand how key aspects of society may evolve in the future and how they might interact with a changing climate.

Anticipating how society might change in the future, in addition to climate, is critical to examining the consequences of and possible responses to climate change. To address this need, the IAM group aims to improve projections of societal trends relevant to assessing climate impacts, mitigation, and adaptation; improve the capacity to link integrated assessment models to NCAR’s Community Earth System Model (CESM) to investigate human-earth system interactions; and improve assessments of impacts, adaptation, and mitigation by better accounting for socio-economic change and its interactions with the climate system.