During the Seventeenth IAMC Annual Meeting held online from 4th to 6th November, the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium was proud to honour Marina Andrijevic (IIASA) with the Early Career Researcher Award for her contributions to the socioeconomic dimension of integrated assessment modelling, including her recent work on adaptive capacities.

SPARCCLE researcher Marina Andrijevic was awarded the prize for her fundamental and outstanding contributions to understanding and developing socioeconomic drivers for use in the integrated assessment and global change research. This includes work on national Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) projections for socioeconomic drivers such as governance and gender, which are widely used in the integrated assessment modelling (IAM) community and beyond.

She has subsequently led thinking on the importance of accounting for differentiated adaptive capacity, for people, sectors and institutions, and the importance of integration in IAM scenarios. This is demonstrated in a recent Nature Climate Change paper “Towards scenario representation of adaptive capacity for global climate change assessments”, which illustrates a framework for developing adaptive capacity scenarios and integrating them into broader global climate scenario frameworks and processes.

Ultimately, these contributions pave the way for improved linkages between IPCC Working Group (WG) II and WG III, enabling more integrated assessments of impacts, mitigation and adaptation, a critical frontier of IAM research.

Her contributions have broadened the scope of the IAM community into new areas of research and have been instrumental in bridging the gap with social science communities, a component of integrated assessment modelling that has long been difficult to address.

“I am deeply honoured to receive this award and proud that my research has been recognised as a contribution to understanding the complexities of socioeconomic systems related to climate change adaptation and mitigation. The IAMC is a community that generates some of the world’s most policy-relevant research on climate change, with a core priority of advancing work on the intertwined challenges of climate change and inequality. This award is a wonderful encouragement for me to keep moving forward in this direction,” says Andrijevic.

Recently, she also led the development of the SSP Extensions Explorer, a website that curates socioeconomic extensions of the SSP drivers to enrich the representation of socioeconomics in global change research.

Typical characterisation of the risk of climate change impacts versus socioeconomic characterisation of adaptive capacity (from Andrijevic et al., 2023)

Reference

Andrijevic, M., Schleussner, CF., Crespo Cuaresma, J., Lissner, T., Muttarak, R., Riahi, K., Theokritoff, E., Thomas, A., van Maanen, N. and Byers, E. (2023). Towards scenario representation of adaptive capacity for global climate change assessments. Nature Climate Change, 13, 778–787. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01725-1