Computer models play a significant role in environmental policy, but offer only a partial picture of the industrial system
Whether it’s electric automobiles, renewable energy, carbon tax or sustainable consumption: Sustainable development requires strategies that meet people’s needs without harming the environment. Before such strategies are implemented, their potential impact on environment, economy, and society needs to be tested.
Computer models play a significant role in environmental policy, but offer only a partial picture of the industrial system
Whether it’s electric automobiles, renewable energy, carbon tax or sustainable consumption: Sustainable development requires strategies that meet people’s needs without harming the environment. Before such strategies are implemented, their potential impact on environment, economy, and society needs to be tested. These tests can be conducted with the help of computer models that depict future demographic and economic development and that examine the interplay between industry and the climate and other essential natural systems. Together with his Norwegian and US colleagues, junior professor Dr. Stefan Pauliuk at the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Freiburg undertook the hitherto most comprehensive review of five major so-called integrated assessment models. Published in the scientific journal “Nature Climate Change,” the team’s results show that these models exhibit substantial deficits in their representation of the industrial system, which may lead to flawed estimates of the potential environmental impacts and societal benefits of new technologies and climate policies.
Continue reading at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Photo Credit: Ludovic Hirlimann via Wikimedia Commons
