The European Union’s ambitious goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050 is supported by the “European Green Deal”, a package of policy initiatives which aims to set the EU on the path to a green transformation. To support the climate policy processes in support of the European Green Deal (as well as the Paris Agreement, COVID-19 recovery and broader sustainability goals), the European Commission called for “Improved adequacy of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)” in 2022. WorldTrans responded to this call by arguing that for Europe to deliver on its Green Deal ambition (to make Europe’s economy climate neutral by 2050), citizen and stakeholder engagement may be as important as dry facts and figures. People react to climate change; people make decisions to act or not to act. This realization made us choose to address transparency, openness and engagement, and to work with models of the system, not its parts. We therefore proposed to address these common weaknesses of current IAMs:
1) Weak representation of social, human and economic heterogeneity;
2) Limited representation of feedbacks between the domains of nature and humans; and
3) Lack of transparency with respect to the inner workings of the models as well as with respect to the uptake of results and involvement of citizens and stakeholders, including limited assessment and traceability of uncertainty.
We address systemic, structural deficiencies in current IAMs rather than making incremental improvements. In doing so, we sacrifice details of any particular sector or process, instead capturing the essences of their functions in order to focus on how those processes affect each other within and across domains. WorldTrans uses system dynamics methods and modelling to deal transparently with multiscale issues and policy response options. We “bridge gaps” between models, experts and user communities by developing attractive learning environments that allows for simulations of decision making processes and joint reflections of meaning and implication. As such, WorldTrans will deliver actionable results in support of the expected impacts and outcomes requested by the call.
At month 18 of the project our progress is on track with respect to all work packages of the project, Version 0.1 and 1 of the model FRIDA is complete, and we are in full progress towards Version 2, as well as finalizing the list of questions and creating novel tools for using FRIDA.
