From emissions to climate impacts and back again

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This fellowship will develop an open-source and user-friendly simple climate model focusing on the impacts of climate change mitigation. Simple climate models are incredibly useful for providing projections of how global temperatures might change under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. Unlike the state-of-the-art climate models run by the Met Office and others around the world, simple models do not need vast amounts of expensive computer resource and time to output results. This means they are powerful tools for supporting policy and decision making on climate mitigation because they provide rapid assessments based on the best available science.Simple climate models used in climate change mitigation assessments (such as those in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group 3 report) only routinely calculate the global mean temperature change since the pre-industrial as a climate change output. While global mean temperature is a useful policy metric and easily communicable, it is a poor description of changes in climate that have the greatest impacts on lives, livelihoods and the economy. Damages and impacts incurred by society and the natural world are typically more sensitive to the severity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts and extreme rainfall, and sea-level rise rather than global average temperature. These outputs are much more relevant for human and natural ecosystems, and further affect crop productivity and health. The research will develop climate impact metrics such as these for use in a simple climate model. This research will allow policymakers to determine the localised benefits of climate change mitigation policies besides the impact on global mean temperature. The model will be made available on a well-documented, interactive website.This fellowship will also explore the feedbacks between climate change and the energy system, implementing these into integrated assessment modelling for the first time. Future emissions projections that are used to drive simple climate models are often derived from coupled models of the economy and energy system called integrated assessment models (IAMs). Integrated assessment models are tools used to determine pathways to sustainable energy and economic development and to report the climate impact of energy policy decisions. Currently, the link from emissions to climate change in IAMs is in one direction only, where there are real and identified feedbacks from the climate on energy supply and demand (e.g. increased requirements for air conditioning should summer temperatures continue to increase). This fellowship will seek to include these real-world climate impacts on the energy supply into integrated assessment models. When combined with the simple regional impacts climate model, it will provide a much more complete picture of the climate change impacts of energy system decisions. One key focus of this work is that model development will be open-source, settling a demand for increased transparency in integrated assessment modelling.The project will build collaborative links between the NERC and IIASA research communities, leveraging experience from two IIASA programs (Energy, and Ecosystems Services and Management) and making use of networking building activities facilitated through an identified senior academic in the UK with existing strong IIASA links.