Integrated assessment modeling of climate change adaptation in forestry and pasture land use: A review

Be it global environmental change or environment and development, landuse and land-cover change is central to the dynamics and consequences in question in the southern Yucatán peninsular region. Designing policies to address these impacts is hampered by the difficulty of projecting land use and land cover, not only because the dynamics are complex but also because consequences are strongly place-based. This chapter describes an integrated assessment modeling framework that builds on the research detailed in earlier chapters in order to project land-use and land-cover change in a geographically explicit way. Integrated assessment is a term that describes holistic treatments of complex problems to assess both science and policy endeavors in global environmental change (Rotmans and Dowlatabadi 1998). The most common form of integrated assessment is computer modeling that combines socioeconomic and biogeophysical factors to predict global climate. Advanced in part by the successes of these global-scale models, integrated assessment has expanded to structure knowledge and set research priorities for a large range of coupled human–environment problems. Increasing recognition is given to the need for integrated assessment models to address regionalscale problems that are masked by global-scale assessments (Walker 1994). Such models must address two issues to project successfully land-use and land-cover change at the regional scale. First, change occurs incrementally in spatially distinct patterns that have different implications for global change (Lambin 1994). Second, a model must account for the complexity of, and relationships among, socio-economic and environmental factors (B. L. Turner et al. 1995). The SYPR integrated assessment model, therefore, has a fine temporal and spatial grain and it places land-use and landcover change at the intersection of land-manager decision-making, the environment, and socio-economic institutions. What follows is a description of an ongoing integrated assessment modeling endeavor of the SYPR project (henceforth, SYPR IA model). The depth and breadth of the SYPR project poses a challenge to the integrated assessment modeling effort since some unifying framework must reconcile a broad array of issues, theories, and data. The global change research community offers a general conception of how environmental change results from infrastructure development, population pressure, market opportunities, resource institutions, and environmental or resource policies (Stern, Young, and Drukman 1992).

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The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP6

Geoscientific Model Development ◽

10.5194/gmd-9-3461-2016 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 9 (9) ◽

pp. 3461-3482 ◽

Cited By ~ 251

Author(s):

Brian C. O'Neill ◽

Claudia Tebaldi ◽

Detlef P. van Vuuren ◽

Veronika Eyring ◽

Pierre Friedlingstein ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Land Use ◽

21St Century ◽

Integrated Assessment ◽

Climate Model ◽

Model Intercomparison ◽

Wide Range ◽

Scenario Model ◽

Intercomparison Project

Abstract. Projections of future climate change play a fundamental role in improving understanding of the climate system as well as characterizing societal risks and response options. The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) is the primary activity within Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) that will provide multi-model climate projections based on alternative scenarios of future emissions and land use changes produced with integrated assessment models. In this paper, we describe ScenarioMIP's objectives, experimental design, and its relation to other activities within CMIP6. The ScenarioMIP design is one component of a larger scenario process that aims to facilitate a wide range of integrated studies across the climate science, integrated assessment modeling, and impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability communities, and will form an important part of the evidence base in the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. At the same time, it will provide the basis for investigating a number of targeted science and policy questions that are especially relevant to scenario-based analysis, including the role of specific forcings such as land use and aerosols, the effect of a peak and decline in forcing, the consequences of scenarios that limit warming to below 2 °C, the relative contributions to uncertainty from scenarios, climate models, and internal variability, and long-term climate system outcomes beyond the 21st century. To serve this wide range of scientific communities and address these questions, a design has been identified consisting of eight alternative 21st century scenarios plus one large initial condition ensemble and a set of long-term extensions, divided into two tiers defined by relative priority. Some of these scenarios will also provide a basis for variants planned to be run in other CMIP6-Endorsed MIPs to investigate questions related to specific forcings. Harmonized, spatially explicit emissions and land use scenarios generated with integrated assessment models will be provided to participating climate modeling groups by late 2016, with the climate model simulations run within the 2017–2018 time frame, and output from the climate model projections made available and analyses performed over the 2018–2020 period.

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