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CFP: The
Anthropogenic Earth System: Modeling Social Systems, Landscapes, and
Urban Dynamics as a Coupled Human+Climate System up to Planetary Scale
Satellite Session at the Conference on Complex Systems 2016
September 19-22 Amsterdam, The
Netherlands
Important Dates:
Abstracts due: July 8th
Please email abstracts up to 500 words
directly to [log in to unmask]
Author
notification: July 9th
Session
date: Wednesday, Sept 21st
Session Overview
In the next several decades, a
changing climate will have increasing impacts on the ways of life of millions
of people worldwide. Cities will need to change their structures, and
agricultural landscapes, shaped by temperatures and rainfall, will be used in
different ways. The results of these dynamics will be changes in economic and
social opportunities, leading to shifts in the distribution of wealth and
poverty and the possible displacement and migration of people on regional or
continental scales.
At a local scale, a wide array of
research has investigated 'coupled natural and human' systems, and a
comparatively new but burgeoning area of research is now specifically examining
Food+Energy+Water systems. Our ability to model and understand local responses to
this changing climatic context has increased substantially, and a large number
of models and simulations examine urban dynamics, landscape change processes,
and other human-driven systems in the face of a changing environment. A key
component has been the use of agent-based modeling, allowing a link between
changes in the natural environment and individual decisions. Alongside this
research, global-scale climate modeling at the macro scale has allowed us to
grow our understanding of the larger trajectory of the earth's physical systems
(e.g. atmospheric and oceanic physics) in long- and near-term time frames. The
domains of integrated assessment models (IAMs) and Representative Concentration
Pathways as standard approaches in long-term climate model are illustrative of
these efforts; these generally are forced to consider the human+climate interactions
unidirectionally, making assumptions about one side and following the
implications on the other.
Until recently, the possibility of
bridging these two domains was beyond serious consideration: computational
power was insufficient to take examples of specific human social systems and
expand to global scales; data for such an exercise was lacking; software
packages, programming techniques, and conceptual frameworks imposed a technical
ceiling; and linkages between the two kinds of systems could not be adequately
specified. However, all of these barriers may be surmountable in the near
future. We propose a session to examine possibilities and challenges of modeling
coupled human and climate systems at a global scale, and to capture dynamic
feedbacks between the two systems: how the climate system will impact the human
system and how these changes will in turn modify the human impacts on the
climate.
We specifically solicit papers in
the following four thematic domains:
1)
Land Use/Land Cover change and changes in Urban
Structure in response to a changing climate. Submissions that focus on
multiple systems, such as Food-Energy-Water systems, are especially encouraged,
as are submissions that emphasize how the changes observed will result in
different impacts on the climate (e.g. reduced emissions).
2)
Software and technical challenges in linking
social and physical models at multiple scales. Discussions of existing and
proposed software toolkits that allow cross-scale comparisons and link to
global scale models are sought.
3)
Theoretical issues in linking
global-scale climate models and forecasts of climate changes over long time
scales (such as CESM or Integrated Assessment Models) with social, behavioral,
economic, demographic, or other human-system components over near-term time
scales, including agent-based models;
4)
Design strategies to capture feedbacks in
both directions between human and climate systems, and represent the human and
climate systems in new ways.
Session Organizers
John T.
Murphy, University of Chicago/Argonne National Lab, USA
Moira Zellner, University of
Illinois-Chicago (UIC)
For more information, contact [log in to unmask]