An Approach to Modeling Complex Socio-Economic Impacts and Responses to Climate Disruption

In this paper we describe the application of a proven methodology for modeling the complex social and economic interactions of a system under stress to the issues that are arising and will arise from global climate disruption. There is a long history in the Defense community of using what are known as strategic simulations or "wargames" to model the complex interactions between the environment, people, resources, infrastructure and the economy in a competitive environment. We describe in this paper, work that we have done on understanding how this heritage can be repurposed to help us explore how the complex interplay between climate disruption and our socio/political and economic structures will affect our future. These strategic simulations would be done under the auspices of the GAIA project (http://gaia.jhuapl.edu). While these simulations cannot definitively predict what will happen, they do illuminate non-linear feedbacks between human choices and the environment. These simulations can be focused on the global, regional, or local environment and capture the various actors (governments, agencies, resources, industries, religious/political groups, etc.) that compete to achieve their particular goals. We note that these simulations are not "zero sum" games - there need not be a winner and a loser. They are, however, competitive influence games: they represent the tools that a nation, state, faction or group has at its disposal to influence policy (diplomacy), finances, industry (economy), infrastructure, information, etc to achieve their particular goals. In the simulation, humans play various roles and understand that not everyone shares the same definition of a successful or favorable outcome. Rigorous post-analysis is used to illuminate where decisions were made that enabled or prevented a particular outcome from occurring. In addition, the simulations allow us to investigate how effective "technology injects" can be in achieving a particular, desired end state. (A "technology inject" might be improved carbon sequestration, a transition o a hydrogen economy, etc). Some examples of the application of this simulation technology to real world problems and a discussion of the framing of climate disruption problems in these terms will be provided.