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Sustainability and Climate Risks
Research UnitSustainability and Climate Risks

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WorldTrans (Transparent Assessments for Real People)

Project description

In order to facilitate the transformation to a climate neutral future, the EU-funded project WorldTrans develops better Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) showing the interactions between climate, economy and society. IAMs deliver policy-relevant insights into sustainable development and global environmental change. Nevertheless, current IAMs face limitations. Citizen engagement is crucial to achieve the goals of the European Green Deal by 2050. WorldTrans addresses the limitations and structural weaknesses of current advanced IAMs including:

  • weak representation of social, human and economic heterogeneity
  • limited representation of feedback between climate change, society and humans
  • lack of transparency regarding the inner workings of the models and the uptake of results and involvement of citizens and stakeholders 

The project overcomes these limitations by using simpler models focusing on the connections between different sectors and feedbacks, especially by including the connection between human behavior and climate change. WorldTrans develops a new, fully connected IAM called FRIDA. The project also applies system dynamics methods and modelling to deal transparently with multi-scale issues and policy response options, and bridges gaps between models, experts and user communities.

WorldTrans is coordinated by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (MET Norway).