Impact Quantification of Global Changes (Global IQ)

Overview

Modern societies are experiencing large transformations in the social, economic and environmental dimensions and the goal of GLOBAL IQ is to better quantify the socio-economic impacts of such changes at global, European and regional scales. The scope of the changes being analyzed include, but are not limited to, the impacts of climate change. 

The project will explore global challenges to infrastructure, the transportation sector, migration, and international trade. Beyond the impacts of change, Global IQ will study possible adaptation strategies with the final goal of evaluating the total costs and the optimal mix of adaptation to and mitigation of these global changes. 

To achieve that goal, the project will estimate socio-economic impacts arising from global changes by using economic models. The 10-member consortium involved in the project is endowed with a large set of state-of-the-art modeling tools that will be further expanded and enriched. Key areas of research will be: agriculture, forestry, land use, energy, European Union competitiveness, labor, and international trade. The socio-economic impact of these challenges on key sectors will be examined with the enhanced set of models. Theoretical innovations concerning discounting, risk and ambiguity will be developed and tested numerically with models.

IIASA Research

IIASA will further develop its GLOBIOM model to address these objectives and contribute with both impact quantification of global changes in different scenarios and an analysis of adaptation strategies. GLOBIOM is a sophisticated model that currently is used to analyze the competition for land use between agriculture, forestry, and bioenergy, which are the main land-based production sectors.

Last edited: 28 May 2014