iRESM: Exploring Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Through Human-Environmental System Interactions at Regional Scales
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is developing a modeling framework, the integrated Regional Earth System Model (iRESM), to address regional human-environmental system interactions in response to climate change and the uncertainties therein. The framework will consist of a suite of integrated models representing regional climate change, regional climate policy, and the regional economy, with a focus on simulating the mitigation and adaptation decisions made over time in the energy, transportation, agriculture, and natural resource management sectors.
Framework development began in 2010 and is planned over five years. The research will include software development and evaluation through several regional case studies, including uncertainty characterization. While iRESM is intended primarily for the scientific research community, it is critical that its scientific output is relevant and robust for regional planning. Hence, a key aspect of this effort is the development of an understanding of regional stakeholder decision support needs to inform model development and demonstration.
iRESM will address stakeholder decision support needs within a broad scientific context that links national and international climate change policy to regional stakeholder decisions in order to investigate the potential constraints and interactions between regional mitigation and adaptation under various climate futures. More specifically, the iRESM framework is being developed to advance scientific understanding in the following four areas:
- How are regional mitigation and adaptation opportunities shaped, enhanced, or constrained by intrinsic regional characteristics?
- How do projected changes in mean climate versus climate extremes affect the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies?
- How might interactions between management decisions and natural processes contribute to rapid or nonlinear changes in the environment? Where might such nonlinearities occur, and do they contribute to climate feedbacks?
- How will adaptation and mitigation strategies interact in the next few decades in terms of achieving their respective goals?