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Thematic Guide to Integrated Assessment Modeling
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Major Unresolved Questions
Integrated assessment, of climate change and in general, abounds with unresolved questions. Outstanding substantive challenges are, in general, widely recognized. For example, with respect to climate change, the biggest challenges include the following:- improving understanding of the biggest long-term driving factors: technological change and population growth;
- building better tools to represent impacts and adaptation, and to assess policies that facilitate adaptation;
- providing useful representation of uncertainty, including low-probability extreme events, and blending of "softer" with "harder" information;
- supplying methods to represent and assess policies as implemented, rather than in idealized form;
- promoting richer tools to study collective decision-making and choices of other key agents than the audience, moving beyond the naive implication that assessment is addressed to a unitary decision-maker with authority to make the relevant policy decisions;
- develping assessment tools relevant over long time horizons: putting climate change in context of other changes over 50 to 100 years (including discontinuities) (robust to range of plausible futures over that long).
In addition, a number of serious unresolved questions exist that are more general in character, concerned with the appropriate scope and audience for assessments, the relationship between assessment and policy-makers, and the extent to which assessment tools can be generalized across issues.
The next section is Assessments for Whom, on What, by Whom?.
