Earlier this year, I attended an invite-only GRO steering committee meeting of scientists, technologists, financiers, economists, and academics, where GSI's Director, Dr. Aled Jones, delivered a detailed presentation on the modelling work done so far, what it implied, and where it was leading.
Dr. Jones was previously Deputy Director of the Programme for Sustainability Leadership at the University Cambridge, where he was Director of the British government's flagship Chevening Fellowships Economics of Climate Change Programme, supported by the UK Foreign Office to deliver the FCO's Strategic Framework. Jones also chairs a working group of the UK government's Department for Energy and Climate Change's Capital Markets Climate Initiative (CMCI).
Jones' GRO initiative has received direct funding from the Foreign Office to develop its modelling capacity, and he is a co-leader of the FCO Task Force's working group on 'Impacts', where he and his team apply the GRO models to assess the way crop reductions would affect global food security.
GRO is developing two types of model: an Agent-Based Model to explore short-term scenarios of policy decisions by simulating social-economical-environmental systems; and a System Dynamics Model capable of providing projections for the next 5 years based on modelling the complex interconnections between finite resources, planetary carrying capacity, and the human economy.
"The financial and economic system is exposed to catastrophic short-term risks that the system cannot address in its current form," Dr. Jones told us.
He described GRO's use of the Agent-Based Model to capture and simulate the multiple factors that led to the 2011 Arab Spring events.
By successfully modeling the "impact of climate-induced drought on crop failures and the ensuing impact on food prices," he said, the model can then be recalibrated to "experiment with different scenarios."
"We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on 'do-nothing' trends"--"that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption."
Another steering committee member raised their hand: "So is this going to happen? Is this a forecast?"
"No," said Jones. "This scenario is based on simply running the model forward. The model is a short-term model. It's not designed to run this long, as in the real world, trends are always likely to change, whether for better or worse."
"Okay, but what you're saying is that if there is no change in current trends, then this is the outcome?" continued the questioner.
Jones nodded with a half-smile. "Yes," he said quietly.
In other words, simply running the Agent-Based Model forward cannot generate a reliable forecast of the future. For instance, no one anticipated the pace at which solar and wind energy would become cost-competitive with fossil fuels. And the fact that governments and insurers are now beginning to scope such risks, and explore ways of responding, shows how growing awareness of the risks has the potential to trigger change.
Whether that change is big enough to avoid or mitigate the worst is another question. Either way, the model does prove in no uncertain terms that present-day policies are utterly bankrupt.
GRO's System Dynamics Model takes a different approach, building on the 'World3' model developed by scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which famously forecast that humankind faced impending "limits to growth" due to environmental and resource constraints.
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