Modeling Climate Change Adaptation: Challenges, Recent Developments and Future Directions

This paper offers a critical review of modeling practice in the field of integrated assessment of climate change and ways forward. Past efforts in integrated assessment have concentrated on developing baseline trajectories of emissions and mitigation scenario analyses. A key missing component in IAMs is the representation of climate impacts and adaptation responses. Through the examination of conceptual, theoretical and empirical frameworks for the analysis of climate impacts and adaptation, we identify five characteristics of an ideal IAM: regional and sectoral detail for impacts and adaptation strategies; distinct representation of the three types of adaptation—adaptation through market adjustments, protective/defensive expenditures, and adaptive/coping expenditures; intertemporal decision making under uncertainty; induced innovation in adaptation-related technologies; and connection with empirical work on impacts and adaptation. Our review of existing IAMs finds that most models are severely lacking in most of these modeling features.