Modeling solutions for a carbon-free world

Future scenarios, technological innovation, advanced analysis: the world’s top climate modeling experts, providing the IPCC with tools to define strategies for curbing global warming, gathered in Venice from November 14 to 16, 2023. The 16th IAMC Annual Meeting was a great opportunity for the Integrated Assessment Models scientific community to assess the state of knowledge, explore the interaction between climate change mitigation, climate policies, and finance, and find solutions to achieve the Net-Zero goal.

The sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC), organized by the CMCC, took place in Venice from November 14 to 16, 2023, bringing together the world’s top experts in climate models. IAMC is the network that provides the IPCC with tools to create future scenarios on which climate policies are based. The focus is on the most advanced tools for monitoring the climate crisis, its impacts on the economy, and possible future mitigation scenarios, i.e., the containment of global warming.

The meeting was an essential moment to present and discuss the state of the art in the field of integrated assessment models, from a national, regional, and global perspective. The CMCC, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, which manages the Consortium’s secretariat, organized the meeting, receiving hundreds of expressions of interest to participate from all continents, about half from non-European countries.

“Over 450 people attended IAMC23 in person or online, making it the biggest annual gathering since its inception. This is a testament to how lively the research community on coupled energy-land-economy-climate models is,” said Massimo Tavoni, director of the European Institute on Economics and the Environment at CMCC and Professor at Politecnico di Milano. “Participants from all continents shared the latest methodological development to inform a variety of pressing issues, spanning both mitigation, climate engineering and adaptation. The research advancements will provide much-needed intelligence to inform policy and international endeavors such as the 7th assessment report of IPCC.”

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) are complex models that integrate human and physical activities. These models focus on the interaction between the economy, society, and the environment to provide relevant information for public policies on global climate change and sustainable development. By integrating data from different scientific disciplines, these models provide a quantitative description of key processes in human and earth systems and their interactions.

The scenarios produced by research institutes affiliated with IAMC have provided fundamental elements to the IPCC to define technological, economic, and social strategies compatible with international climate agreements. For example, the concept and strategies of Net-Zero were defined by scenarios produced by models belonging to IAMC, including CMCC models.

“We were honored to host the IAMC annual meeting,” said Tavoni. “Achieving zero CO2 emissions is a necessary condition to stabilize the climate: making this goal a reality requires robust and transparent science that can inform society and decision-makers. This is the purpose of IAMC.”

The event, which took place in person with some online sessions, brought together some of the most authoritative experts in the field, offering a unique opportunity to explore the latest research and developments in the field of data, methods, and integrated assessment models, present the activities of IAMC Scientific Working Groups, and facilitate interactions among various international collaborators.

The conference hosted plenary sessions, parallel sessions, and research poster presentations, providing a comprehensive overview of various topics, including scenarios, climate models, and projections, mitigation and adaptation strategies and policies, finance, and policy. High-level speakers participating in the meeting included IPCC Chair Jim Skea, European Commission Clima DG Vicky Pollard, and IAMC Scientific Steering Committee Chair John Weyant, among others, bringing unique and in-depth perspectives on integrated assessment modeling.

IAMC (Integrated Assessment Consortium) is an organization composed of research institutes dedicated to the scientific understanding of issues related to the modeling and analysis of integrated assessments. IAMC was created in 2007 in response to the IPCC’s call for a research organization to lead the integrated assessment model community in developing new scenarios for use by climate modelers to conduct numerical experiments in both the short and long term.

More information about the 16th IAMC meeting is available at this link.