The project integrates marine ecosystem interactions into an economic integrated assessment model of climate change. The underlying Analytic Climate Economy (ACE) model is at the forefront of explicitly integrating uncertainties about climate change and its interactions with the socioeconomic system. It is also one of the first integrated models to analyze policies among strategically interacting countries. Integrated assessment models evaluate different policy proposals that regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and we have learned from ACE and related models that the uncertainty governing the climate-economy interactions substantially strengthens the necessary policy levels and the need for international cooperation. The present model permits policy evaluation from the perspective of a global social planner who trades-off global economic production against global climate change impacts but also from the perspective of strategically interacting countries and regions that only partially incorporate damages to other countries, which is a better description of the current policy arena and can guide us to better and more ambitious implementations of the necessary goals.
The current project integrates climate change damage to marine ecosystems into the socio-economic policy evaluations of the ACE model. In addition, our project will analyze the overall impact of technologies that try to increase the CO2 uptake of our oceans to reduce the greenhouse effect that is currently warming our planet. With our collaborators at the Bren school of Environmental Science & Management we analyze key processes related to climate change that increase the stress on marine ecosystems, and we gather the available information about how these stress factors interact with pre-existing stress factors that include fishery and pollution of the seas. The project then translates the crucial interactions and their uncertainties into the integrated model to better evaluate different policy proposals.