07 October 2015 - 09 October 2015
Cracow, Poland

4th International Workshop on Uncertainty in Atmospheric Emissions

The 4th International Workshop on Uncertainty in Atmospheric Emissions is jointly organized by the Systems Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Lviv Polytechnic National University and IIASA. The 4th Uncertainty Workshop follows up and expands on the scope of the earlier Uncertainty Workshops.

The assessment of greenhouse gases and air pollutants (indirect GHGs) emitted to and removed from the atmosphere is high on the political and scientific agendas. Building on the UN climate process, the international community strives to address the long-term challenge of climate change collectively and comprehensively, and to take concrete and timely action that proves sustainable and robust in the future. Under the umbrella of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, mainly developed  country parties to the Convention have, since the mid-1990s, published annual or periodic inventories of emissions and removals, and continued to do so after the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention ceased in 2012. Policymakers use these inventories to develop strategies and policies for emission reductions and to track the progress of those strategies and policies. Where formal commitments to limit emissions exist, regulatory agencies and corporations rely on emission inventories to establish compliance records.

However, as increasing international concern and cooperation aim at policy-oriented solutions to the climate change problem, a number of issues circulating around uncertainty have come to the fore, which were undervalued or left unmentioned at the time of the Kyoto Protocol but require adequate recognition under a workable and legislated successor agreement. Accounting and verification of emissions in space and time, compliance with emission reduction commitments, risk of exceeding future temperature targets, evaluating effects of mitigation versus adaptation versus intensity of induced impacts at home and elsewhere, and accounting of traded emission permits are to name but a few.

Workshop Topics

  • Towards achieving accurate and precise emission inventories
  • Integrating uncertainty across spatial scales (local to global)
  • Integrating uncertainty across temporal scales (diagnostic and prognostic)
  • Reconciling uncertainty bottom-up and top-down
  • Integrating uncertainty across systems scales (e.g., across GHGs, direct and indirect; sources versus sinks; risk of induced versus chance of avoided impacts, etc.)
  • Verifying GHG emissions to support international climate agreements
  • Complying with GHG emission limitations and reductions
  • Uncertainty in trading emissions
  • Communicating and valuing uncertainty (today and in the future)
  • Integrating uncertainty into decision-making
  • Advanced systems analysis techniques of handling uncertainty

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Extended deadline: 15 August 2015.
Authors are invited and encouraged to submit abstracts for the Workshop. Maximum one-page (A4) abstract should be submitted electronically to by the deadline. All abstracts must be written and submitted in English (official Workshop language). Please use 12pt Times Roman font and single spacing for the abstract and submit in .docx format.


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Last edited: 07 October 2015

CONTACT DETAILS

Matthias Jonas

Guest Senior Research Scholar Advancing Systems Analysis Program

Workshop information leaflet

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313