IIASA's Work on Climate Change: Assessing Environmental Impacts

This Status Report is adapted from a lecture presented by Matthias Jonas at the Institute for Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna, May 1992. In his lecture, Dr. Jonas clearly summarizes the status of the work being carried out within the Climate Change Projections Study at IIASA. This work involves linking a policy-oriented climate change model, the Integrated Model to Assess the Greenhouse Effect (IMAGE), to models of ecological change such as the Global Vegetation Model, the Timber Assessment Model, and the Regional Acidification INformation and Simulation (RAINS) model. These models were at least partially developed at IIASA. The result of this linkage work, which is being carried out in collaboration with the Netherlands National Institute of Public Health and Environmental Protection (RIVM), and possibly other institutes, is intended to be a tool to help policy makers assess in a rapid and time-dependent way changes in regional ecology resulting from various greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

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