In the past days I participated in the workshop titled “Best practices for modeling human behaviour in IAMs”, where I remind that the acronym IAM stands for Integrated Assessment Model, i.e. the model family that comprises my WITCH model.

The workshop was organized in the context of COBHAM, the ERC project coordinated by my Supervisor Massimo Tavoni.

Behavior is a relevant aspect in Integrated Assessment Modeling, which has become topical in recent years. The research question is quite simple: IAMs develop energy-economic-climate scenarios, depicting mitigation pathways for the future that are characterized by deep changes in the energy sector, in transport demand, and so on. However, these scenarios do not model the actual socio-technical dynamics of those changes and take somehow for granted that consumers’ choices will be coherent with the transition. So, how can we model this aspect in IAMs? And first of all, is it necessary, and is it even possible?

These are the questions that have been addressed in the workshop, from which a position paper on this will shortly be produced. I am not expert with this topic, and I do not explicitly considered this aspect in my Marie Curie project, but knowing more about it will surely be useful for potential future modeling works.

In the meantime, you can find more info about the workshop here.