Charting pathways to climate change mitigation in a coupled socio-climate model

Abstract

Geophysical models of climate change are becoming increasingly sophisticated, yet less effort is devoted to modelling the human systems causing climate change and how the two systems are coupled. Here, we develop a simple socio-climate model by coupling an Earth system model to a social dynamics model. We treat social processes endogenously—emerging from rules governing how individuals learn socially and how social norms develop—as well as being influenced by climate change and mitigation costs. Our goal is to gain qualitative insights into scenarios of potential socio-climate dynamics and to illustrate how such models can generate new research questions. We find that the social learning rate is strongly influential, to the point that variation of its value within empirically plausible ranges changes the peak global temperature anomaly by more than 1°C. Conversely, social norms reinforce majority behaviour and therefore may not provide help when we most need it because they suppress the early spread of mitigative behaviour. Finally, exploring the model’s parameter space for mitigation cost and social learning suggests optimal intervention pathways for climate change mitigation. We find that prioritising an increase in social learning as a first step, followed by a reduction in mitigation costs provides the most efficient route to a reduced peak temperature anomaly. We conclude that socio-climate models should be included in the ensemble of models used to project climate change.

When conflicts get heated, so does the planet: social-climate dynamics under inequality

“…These limitations diminish the usefulness of our model for accurate social-climate projections. However, as noted in [27,21,28,22,23], simple models are still valuable tools to understand processes, attempt new modelling methods, and to explore how the approach could be e↵ective in suggesting policy changes [9]. To this end, our results suggest that social-climate interactions in a heterogeneous population can have nontrivial impacts on both climate trends and opinion dynamics, and thus merit further study.…”

“…We focus on the latter. Individuals can follow either a mitigation (M) or a non-mitigation (N) strategy [28]. The M strategy corresponds to mitigating carbon emissions released to the atmosphere, while the N strategy does not reduce emissions.…”

“…Unlike Ref. [27,28], individuals are in one of two groups, which we label as 'rich' (R) and 'poor' (P). Since the two groups can use the same strategies but get di↵erent utility, we model an asymmetric evolutionary game.…”

“…Elsewhere, it has been suggested that evolutionary game theory may be an e↵ective way of modelling social mechanisms as a dynamic process coupled to climate dynamics [23]. Recent coupled social-climate models have explored the implications of emergent social-climate dynamics [27,21,28,22,23], including the role of our reaction to extreme climate events where human behaviour is described by the theory of planned behaviour [27], and the role of social learning [28] and social norms [27,28], in determining climate trajectories. We furthermore suggest that the asymmetries engendered by having distinct groups with di↵erent resource levels could play a significant role in social-climate dynamics and should be addressed in models.…”

Multi-agent kunstig intelligens og offentlig politikk

“…Helsen vår er selvfølgelig også knyttet til miljøet, vi lever i, og datamodeller, som viser effektene av klimaendringer er også relevante. En gruppe forskere har nylig forsøkt å utvikle modeller, som kan simulere den gjensidige påvirkningen mellom økologisk dynamikk og menneskelig handlinger for å finne måter, man kan redusere menneskeskapte klimaendringer på (Beckage et al, 2018;Bury, Bauch & Anand, 2019).…”