Geographic Scaling Issues in Integrated Assessments of Climate Change

摘要

If top-down, large-scale integrated assessments of global climate change issues were all we need - sufficient to answer most of the important intellectual and practical questions about climate change impacts and responses -then scaling would not be an important enough topic to justify organizing this workshop. We are learning, however, that answering such questions often requires atten-tion to local scales as well as global, despite very serious operational complications in figuring out how to integrate local-scale analysis into com-prehensive integrated assessment modeling. Recognizing that we are in some respects nosing into territory that, if not entirely new, is still early in a serious exploration process, this paper first reviews how geographic scale matters in integrated assessments of global climate change issues. Next, it looks at operational issues in incorporating a variety of scales and cross-scale dynamics in integrated assessment modeling (overlapping several of the other papers prepared for the workshop). It concludes with some suggestions for research to improve our capabilities in dealing with macro-microscale interactions in global change processes. The intent here is not to dig into a few particular scaling issues in depth but to sketch the landscape of scale-related issues as a contribution to the general workshop discussion, reporting a not entirely integrated assemblage of recent experience that may have some bearing on scaling issues in integrated assessment.