Webinar: November 5, 2024, 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. Eastern time 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwuf-6ppjoqHNJYZgoibkmNuJ6qhHZiVu1G (after registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting as well as the option to add it to your calendar) 

Abstract: Scenarios of future emissions and land use have been most commonly produced without accounting for the effects that climate impacts linked to those emissions and land use changes may have. The questions of how important such impacts could be, at the regional or global scale, has become an increasingly cogent one. Using the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM), we implement climate impacts on water supply, agricultural productivity, and energy demand driven by climatic impact drivers whose evolution over the 21st century is representative of a climate consistent with GCAM’s reference scenario and compare the output to the reference at both regional and global scales. We show that the impacts from the version of GCAM that uses GDP as an exogenous input are not sufficient to bend emission pathways at the global scale. However, we see effects emerge at the regional scale in terms of emissions, among other metrics linked to water, land and energy. We expect the impacts to become more significant at an aggregate, global scale in a forthcoming version of the model with endogenous GDP. Meanwhile, we document the mechanisms that drive the difference at regional scales which could still be significant in their impacts for individual economies and populations.

Speaker bio: Claudia Tebaldi is a statistician by training and her work has centered around uncertainty characterization in future projections, with focus on connecting the physical changes in the climate system to impact studies and risk assessment. She joined the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI), a division of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2019, after many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She has worked on the last three Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group I) on the physical science basis. She was an author of the latest (5th) US National Climate Assessment. She co-chairs ScenarioMIP, which coordinates scenario simulations by the world’s climate modeling centers under WCRP's CMIP. She maintains an affiliation to Climate Central Inc., a non-profit, non-advocacy science-communication organization educating the US public on the impacts of climate change and its solutions. She is also an elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union.