WorldTrans - TRANSPARENT ASSESSMENTS FOR REAL PEOPLE

There are a few important working hypotheses that lie behind our choice of approach to this call. For Europe to deliver on its Green Deal ambition (to make Europe’s economy climate neutral by 2050), we believe that citizen engagement stakeholder engagement may be as important as dry facts and figures. People (not economies) react to climate change, people make decisions to act or not to act. Such is the nature of a democratic process. It is this realization that has made us choose to address transparency, openness, engagement and to work with models of the system, not its parts. WorldTrans will focus on three key limitations of the state-of-the-art of IAMs, namely:1 Weak representation of social, human and economic heterogeneity; 2 Limited representation of feedbacks between the domains of nature and humans; and 3 Lack of transparency with respect to the inner workings of the models as well as with respect to the uptake of results and involvement of citizens and stakeholders, including limited assessment and traceability of uncertainty. We will address systemic, structural deficiencies in current IAMs rather than making incremental improvements. In doing so, we sacrifice details of any particular sector or process, instead capturing the essences of their functions in order to focus on how those processes affect each other within and across domains. WorldTrans will use system dynamics methods and modelling to deal transparently with multiscale issues and policy response options; and “bridge gaps” between models, experts and user communities by developing attractive learning environments that allows for simulations of decisionmaking processes and joint reflections of meaning and implication. As such, WorldTrans will deliver actionable results in support of the expected impacts and outcomes requested by the call.