System Dynamic Models of Coupled Natural-Social Systems

June 22-26 2009,

Bekkjarvik, Norway

This workshop was a joint ECF – GSD initiative

The conference took place in a small, historic conference hotel (a former herring station) on a charming island, Bekkjarvik, in the Norwegian fjords south of Bergen.

The workshop had four main aims:

To develop a family of mutually supporting system-dynamic models of coupled natural-social systems with maximal transparency for communication with policy makers and the general public (for example, as interactive web-based models or games)
To provide meta-analysis tools for jointly assessing the model family
To agree on forms of possible future collaboration
To disseminate results of workshop through publications etc.

The workshop involved 24 participants from Europe, US, Australia and Russia, and was organized by the Nansen Environment and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC), Ola Johannessen, and from GSD, Klaus Hasselmann and Kristian Lindgren.

Outcomes of the workshop:

The general goals of the workshop will be presented in a short article to be submitted to the Policy section of Science. The article will stress the need for a new approach to the analysis of coupled natural-socio-economic systems, and the associated scientific climate policy advice, following the failure of traditional general equilibrium macroeconomic models and the need for Keynesian-type economic growth and transformation stimuli through investments in renewable energy.
The results of the workshop will be submitted as a series of a collected papers for a special issue to a peer-reviewed journal.
The models presented at the workshop will be made available as open-access or web-based models via the GSD and ECF home pages.
A series of possible future project proposals will be developed and submitted to the EU and national funding agencies.
ECF has offered to act as coordinator of the future activities of the system-dynamic modeling network.

Downloadable files:

List of presentations:

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