Register for the Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures

The Scenarios Forum will be taking place as an in-person and partly online conference at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and Laxenburg Conference Center in Laxenburg, Austria.

The forum brings together a diverse set of communities who are using or developing scenarios for use in climate change and sustainability analysis to: exchange experiences, ideas, and lessons learned, identify opportunities for synergies and collaboration, reflect on the use of scenarios, identify knowledge gaps for future research.

The first Forum on Scenarios for Climate and Societal Futures was organized in Denver, Colorado, in 2019 and provided a key means of facilitating integration across the climate modeling, integrated assessment, and impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability communities, as well as with additional relevant research communities including future studies, development economics, and governance. The activities at the first Scenarios Forum were summarized in a Meeting Report (O’Neill at al, 2019). Based on the Scenarios Forum 2019, the state of the use of the Scenarios Framework was summarized and several next steps for the Scenario Process were identified, synthesized in a paper by O’Neill et al. (2020).

The Scenarios Forums are presented by the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios (ICONICS), who aims to organize and stimulate the Scenarios Process and to foster interaction across climate-related scientific disciplines. The ambition is to rotate the conferences geographically and between organizers from different scientific disciplines. The ICONICS Steering Committee has taken on the role to solicit and select conference organizers and assure that a Scenarios Forum is taking place every other year. The actual organization, specific focus, and details of each Scenarios Forum are in the hands of the conference organizer and their Scientific Steering Committee.

The Forum is presented by the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios (ICONICS) and hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in partnership with IAMC.

Tune in for a session organized by our MESH working group on Session #42: Advances in human-Earth System interactions in scenario development with invited talks by Alan Di Vittorio (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Sibel Eker (Radboud University, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Registration is now open for virtual attendance! 

The Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) is currently accepting applications to participate in its upcoming virtual workshop, “Linking Human and Earth System Models for Global Change Analysis”. Held July 19-21, 2021, this workshop will bring together researchers working on a range of strategies to improve the coupled modeling of human and Earth systems.

Workshop and poster applications are due by June 20, 2021. Apply here.

Workshop Overview:

Model and scenario analysis using models of the human and/or Earth System are important tools for global environmental change research. These approaches have informed past assessments produced by the IPCC and contribute to the current AR6 assessment cycle. However, as research questions and new assessments increasingly address the intersection of human and Earth systems, there is a need for improved coupling between human and physical systems that would allow for feedbacks and interactions to occur and emergent properties to evolve. Understanding the coupling of these systems is a newly emerging field of research that requires a broad range of exploratory modeling approaches to address fundamental questions: What key feedbacks play a role in shaping the co-evolution of these systems? What are the best ways to model interactions between these systems? What are the best ways to represent uncertainty in these interacting systems?

Participants will collaborate virtually through facilitated dialogues, individual surveys, a poster session, a live public lecture, and opportunities for informal networking. Workshop participants will also initiate a synthesis paper to highlight new insights, key challenges, and promising research directions in linking human and Earth system models for global change analysis.

Detailed workshop information is at: https://www.agci.org/event/21s2.

Virtual Poster Session
On July 20, 2021 from 3-3:30pm (EDT), AGCI will hold a virtual poster session in conjunction with the upcoming workshop. Students, scientists, and professionals are encouraged to submit posters on workshop themes. Poster presenters will have the opportunity to host a virtual break-out room to share findings and answer questions via video chat with colleagues and a public audience.

Poster abstracts are due by June 20, 2021. Submission form and details.

Organizers†
Victor Brovkin (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology), Kate Calvin (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Alan Di Vittorio (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Brian O’Neill (Joint Global Change Research Institute), Julia Pongratz (University of Munich), Mark Rounsevell (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Benjamin Sanderson (CERFACS/NCAR), Detlef Van Vuuren (PBL Netherlands Environmental Change), Hannah Liddy (Columbia University/NASA GISS),
† Organized by the AIMES Modeling the Earth System and Human interactions (MESH) Working Group

Questions?
Contact Martín Bonzi, AGCI Program Associate, at martinb@agci.org or 970-925-7376.