Climate Action Programme lecture Jan Kwakkel and Giacomo Marangoni

Date: Thursday November 9, 2023
Moderator: Tatiana Filatova

• Click here to download the presentation of Jan Kwakkel
• Click here to download the presentation of Giacomo Marangoni
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"Next generation of Integrated Assessment Models to ethically inform decision support"

by Jan Kwakkel  

How can climate governance interventions ensure a fast and fair transition to a global carbon-neutral and climate-resilient society? Large computational models, called Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), quantify future climate-economic scenarios and shape the current discussion on the global response to climate change. These models capture essential relationships between environmental systems, economic actors, and energy technologies. However, the assessments using these models are vulnerable to blind spots due to the neglected modelling of deep uncertainties, non-linear dynamics, conflicting societal objectives, implicit normative assumptions, policy realism, and complex actor interactions. By developing and integrating new critical elements in IAMs and the ways in which they are being used, we can push the frontier of model-based decision-making for climate action and deliver the next generation of IAMs. 

"What if? From uncertain climate-economic scenarios to informed climate policy decisions"

by Giacomo Marangoni 

Coupled climate-energy-economic models provide a useful framework for examining "What if" scenarios and assessing the trade-offs of alternative courses of global climate action. Nonetheless, these climate policy evaluations often involve looking deep into the future and making simplifying assumptions to navigate many socio-economic, climatic, and technological uncertainties. In this seminar, we will discuss key sources of uncertainty, modelling tools to better understand them, and strategies to derive robust policy insights despite them. We will also explore how socio-technical tipping points, a critical type of uncertainty, can be useful for rethinking how to accelerate the clean energy transition, and how this approach is leading to new research avenues within this flagship and the related scientific community. 

About the Speakers:
Both speakers fall under the theme: Climate Change Governance and work in the flagship "Next generation of IAMs to ethically inform decision support". Jan Kwakkel is project leader, Giacomo Marangoni is Academic Crareer Tracker.

Jan Kwakkel is Full Professor of Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty. His research interest is model-based support for decision making under deep uncertainty. His research focuses on the developing and testing innovative model-based techniques for the design of dynamic adaptive policy pathways. Within this, he is particularly interested in how to bring moral considerations into the quantitative analysis. He has applied his research in a range of domains including climate adaptation, flood risk management, transport and logistics, resource economics, and national safety and security. He is the lead developer of an open source workbench for exploratory modeling, scenario discovery, and multi-objective robust optimization. Next to his research on decision making under deep uncertainty, Dr. Kwakkel also has an interested in text mining with a focus on analyzing scientific publications and patents.

Giacomo Marangoni is Assistant Professor in the Multi-Actor Systems department at the TPM faculty. He has developed and used IAMs for over ten years, publishing numerous articles on multi-objective optimization and uncertainty analysis of mitigation strategies, the feasibility of clean energy transition, energy conservation, technological learning, and climate inequality. Withing his Climate Action Flagship, he is further researching how to design robust model-based climate policies, properly accounting for non-linear socio-technical processes, tipping point dynamics, conflicting environmental and economic objectives, ethical concerns and deep uncertainties.

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