MIPs, which use detailed climate and impact models to assess environmental and economic effects of different climate-change scenarios, require international coordination among multiple research groups, and use a rigid modeling structure with a fixed set of climate-change scenarios. This highly dispersed, inflexible modeling approach makes it difficult to produce consistent and timely climate impact assessments under changing economic and environmental policies. In addition, MIPs focus on a single economic sector at a time and do not represent feedbacks among sectors, thus degrading their ability to produce accurate projections of climate impacts and meaningful comparisons of those impacts across multiple sectors.
To overcome these drawbacks, researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change propose an alternative method that only a handful of other groups are now pursuing: a self-consistent modeling framework to assess climate impacts across multiple regions and sectors. They describe the Joint Program’s implementation of this method and provide illustrative examples in a new study published in Nature Communications.