Final Program• Participant list• Related Publications

Conference outcomes:
• Commentary published in Climate Policy
• Special Issue of Climatic Change

IIASA’s Population and Climate Change (PCC) Program and Greenhouse Gas Initiative (GGI) jointly sponsored a conference on Learning and Climate Change on April 10 and 11, 2006. The conference aimed to stimulate thinking on how to move beyond the incorporation of uncertainty in climate change analysis and account for learning – that is, the acquisition of new information that leads to changes in uncertainty over time.

Uncertainty has become a necessary component of any analysis, discussion, or decision related to the climate change issue. Much less widely appreciated is the potential for our current conception of the uncertainty associated with the climate change issue to change over time. How fast and in what way uncertainty might change – and what the implications may be for today’s decisions – is only beginning to be explored. This meeting brought together a small group of researchers from within and outside of the climate change field to present and discuss recent work on learning. The goal was to stimulate new ideas on how best to incorporate the potential for learning into climate change analyses by examining lessons from the past in other fields, alternative approaches to the analysis of learning, simulations of future learning, and integrated analyses that explicitly analyze policy questions.

For more information about conference background, see the Extended Conference Description.

Responsible for this page: Katja Scherbov
Last updated: 14 Jul 2008