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Home > Projects
The Effects of Climate Change in Canada: System Dynamics Modelling from the Perspective of Sustainability (2003-07)
The main objectives of the research are an improved understanding of the basic connections and relationships within the social-economic-climatic system that determine its behaviour, rather than the prediction of future events. Based on this improved understanding, a decision-support tool will be developed to help policy-makers to enact effective policies and programs to address and to adapt to climate change.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), studies consistently find strong evidence for anthropogenic influences on a global climate that has changed demonstrably since pre-industrial times. As a society, we should be concerned about the possibly devastating consequences of such changes, since increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations could result in large-scale, high-impact, non-linear, and potentially abrupt and irreversible changes in physical and biological systems.
Our research offers a system dynamics-based approach to climate change modeling -- an approach fundamentally different from the standard "climate model-driving scenario" procedure followed by most climate change research. System dynamics is a methodology that elucidates the internal structure of the system under study, allowing investigation of the actual relationships between system elements, and determination of the results of simulated decisions on such interconnections. Because the overall social-economic-climatic system is driven by dynamic feedbacks via its multiple interconnections, the focus of system dynamics on explicit modelling of the feedbacks within and between components of the social-economic-climatic system is ideal.
The main objectives of the research are an improved understanding of the basic connections and relationships within the social-economic-climatic system that determine its behaviour, rather than the prediction of future events. Based on this improved understanding, a decision-support tool will be developed to help policy-makers to enact effective policies and programs to address and to adapt to climate change.
Information dated 2006 and found here
| Timeline | September 2003 - August 2007 |
| Team | Evan G.R. Davies, PhD Candidate (primary investigator) Slobodan P. Simonovic, Professor |
| Funding | Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada |
| Collaborators | Facility for Intelligent Decision Support The University of Western Ontario |
| Publications | Further information can be found here |