A more complete IMAGE: enhancing the climate change impact representation in integrated assessment models

Abstract Currently, climate impacts are mostly absent in the analysis of process-based integrated assessment models (IAMs). This is becoming increasingly problematic given the fact that climate impacts are expected to influence both baseline developments as well as the capacity to mitigate and adapt in the future. This paper presents a set of scenarios made using the IAM IMAGE with climate change impacts on labor productivity and GDP, renewable energy supply, heating and cooling demand, food production, water availability, and biodiversity. The results show that these impacts can have significant effect on existing projections of the economic, energy and land system that are usually not included in IAM projections. In the current implementation, the aggregated economic impacts are often larger in size than sectoral feedbacks, such as those on energy supply and demand, GHG emissions, and food consumption. Importantly, we find that there are several hotspot areas, including Western Africa, Indonesia and the Middle East, where multiple risks accumulate more than in other regions.