Work package 4

Spatial and social heterogeneity in integrated assessment modelling

Improving the social and spatial resolution of models is crucial for representing heterogeneity and developing a realistic and multi-dimensional integrated assessment of climate change. Furthermore, evaluating climate policies requires value judgements regarding how inequality is taken into account, how much risk is socially acceptable, social attitudes towards uncertainty, the value of lives, and population size. NAVIGATE improves the regional and country-level coverage of IAMs, including spatial downscaling of aggregated IAM results, and new methodologies allowing more flexibility in the regional configuration of global models. NAVIGATE also advances methodologies to capture within-country income inequality in integrated assessment modelling (e.g. via multi-household representations and income distribution models) and analyse consumption inequality and poverty with a focus on basic needs (energy, food, water). These methods are subsequently used to investigate the distributional implication of climate policies, and how inequality can be mitigated. Moreover, NAVIGATE aims to develop and apply state-of-the-art multi-dimensional welfare concepts to go beyond the traditional cost-benefit framework. To underpin these advances, NAVIGATE also includes population dynamics in IAMs (e.g. mortality, fertility, education, gender composition, and migration flows).