1st Hamburg Workshop on Agent-based Modeling of Environmental Challenges and Climate Policy
10-11 March 2017 in Hamburg, Germany
Nicolas Stern (Nature, 2016) reviews the problems of using integrated assessment models (IAMs) in climate economics and calls for a new wave of models , building on the advancements of agent-based models (ABMs): “ABMs, by contrast, seek to provide more realistic representations of socio-economics by simulating the economy through the interactions of a large number of different agents, on the basis of specific rules. ABMs are widely used in finance, but have yet to be seriously applied to climate change. These are promising developments.” (Stern, Nature, 2016, [1]).
To address these and related issues the workshop aims to bring together PhD students and researchers working on ABMs of environmental challenges and climate policy. Keynote speakers address major issues of this relationship: Kristian Lindgren (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden) provides insights on the complexity of energy systems by agent-based modeling; Andrea Roventini (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy) shows recent results from an integrated-assessment ABM of climate policy; Jürgen Scheffran (Universität Hamburg, Germany) gives an introduction to agents, coalitions and social networks in environmental conflict and cooperation; and Klaus G. Troitzsch (Prof. Emeritus) presents a model which tries to understand what happens when political leaders implement climate relevant strategies from different incomplete or counterfactual information.
[1] Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Stern, Nicholas: Economics: Current climate models are grossly misleading, Nature 530, 407-409 (2016); advance online publication, 25 February 2016 (doi: 10.1038/nature530407a).
