| Until now, the interaction between the ?integrated assessment? community and the ?climate modeling? community has been limited mainly to the exchange of model-output. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have been designed to support the development of integrated projections or scenarios including explicitly the role of human activities and interactions with the Earth system. They also play a key role in the development of emission scenarios, such as the ones used within the context of IPCC. Climate models or GCMs represent the natural part system Earth and can simulate the response of the climate system on changes in atmospheric concentrations of GHGs or other substances and changes in land-use and land-cover. By establishing a closer connection between IAMs and GCMs, more insight can be achieved in the feedbacks between anthropogenic emissions and land-use/land-cover changes on the one hand and climate impacts on the other. In the fifth assessment report of IPCC, these feedbacks will play an important role. This proposal aims to contribute to improving the knowledge on emissions-land use/land cover-climate feedbacks by coupling two model systems that play an important role in the IPCC-process: The IAM IMAGE, which is one of the four models used to develop new IPCC-scenarios, and the Earth System Model EC-Earth. The feedbacks will be explored in two Ph D studies along two lines: 1) land use and land cover and 2) greenhouse gas emissions. The studies will be started in parallel and the extent of interaction between the modeling systems will increase over time. In the first step, IMAGE uses model-output from EC-Earth. Then, both model systems will be run in parallel. In the third step, the model systems will be coupled online (i.e. the exchange of information at regular timer-intervals during a simulation), resulting in direct feedbacks and interactions, if they exist. By comparing the results of the model experiments, insights can be obtained in the importance of the feedbacks between the climate and the human system. Tthe feedbacks of land cover/land use and emissions will be compared with other processes and feedbacks in the climate system. In a last step, it will be investigated how the insights found can be useful in future generation Integrated Assessment Models. |
