Integrated Assessment of Climate Change

Course goals

Content

In this course we will review the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes every few years the state of the art knowledge on climate change. We will first go through the most relevant chapters of the recently published Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) to have a good background on climate and human-caused climate change and of key adaptation and mitigation strategies. Then we will discuss how the science can contribute to societal and policy challenges. There are three key topics of interest: 1) assessment to collect and distill information about large scale environmental problems; 2) how the IPCC AR6 report is constructed and its science base and 3) the contribution and role of climate and integrated assessment models. We will also specifically look in to different scenarios and discuss the implications of various strategies. With Jupyter Notebooks the students learn to work with large (climate) data bases and model outputs, tracing back the key findings of the new assessment report.  

Utrecht University offers various courses related to climate change (e.g., Current themes in climate change (NS-MO434M), which focuses more on the physical processes of climate change). We have a broader perspective and also consider recent advances in adaptation and mitigation strategies. Students are allowed/encouraged to follow both courses.