Integrative assessment of mitigation, impacts, and adaptation to climate change

摘要

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), representing the analysts who perform the assessments and the political system which commissions them, together with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (ITASA), organized the first international workshop to focus on the comparative assessment of mitigation of climate change and on its potential impacts and adaptation strategies (1--2 September 1992). One of the key findings of this workshop was the need for integrated assessment. Numerous models and less formalized approaches analyze anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gas emissions, their concentrations in the atmosphere, the resulting climate forcing, impacts of the induced climate change on the economy and other human activities, as well as possible mitigation and adaptation strategies. Studies that include all or several of these salient aspects of the climate change problem are known as integrated assessments. Subsequently, IPCC included integrated assessment in its Working Group III that deals with economic questions and cross-cutting issues. One year after the first workshop IIASA convened a second workshop (13--15 October 1993), specifically to review the current practice of integrated assessments, directions for improvement and further research, and implications for climate change policies. This volume presents the proceedings of the 1993 workshop. Selected papers are indexed separately for inclusion in the Energy Science and Technology Database.