Talk by Louis J. Gross

Linking models of human behavior, risk perception and climate change: a system dynamics perspective

abstract: The vast majority of climate models designed to project future global temperature trajectories ignore feedbacks between human behavioral and social system responses and the climate system. Prior research on models linking climate models to human behavior provide evidence that these linkages can significantly modify future trajectories compared to climate models based only on natural system processes. We will describe our efforts to model the interactions of climate systems and human social systems, focusing particularly on risk perception. We will describe how we model human risk perception and associated changes in attitudes as driven by the experience of climate change, for example, from extreme climate events and economic damages, and how this perceived risk motivates willingness to pay for abatement of greenhouse gas emissions and support for ‘green’ policies. We take a system dynamics approach and incorporate submodels for (i) extreme climate events, (ii) cognition and memory processing as a balance between sensing and forgetting extreme climate events that allows for habituation, (iii) an economic growth model augmented to account for the economic impacts from a changing climate by deducting climate damages from  total economic production, and (iv) associated dynamics of attitudes as affected by social norms and perceived behavioral control that determine investment in greenhouse gas abatement. This talk will focus on the cognitive component of the model through which behaviors change due to personal experience rather than through social interactions. These models are linked to a climate model and applied to project global temperature over this century taking account of uncertainties in model components.