PIK Biennial Report 2000-2001 - Potsdam Institute for Climate ...

TOPIK 4 - Emergence of a Global Subject
The management of global change requires a subtle
interplay between the most diverse political strategies
and millions of "rational" everyday decisions. Out of this
arises, through worldwide communication, something
like a planetary will, which may be symbolized as a fictitious
Global Subject. The interactions between very different
actors play a decisive role in this, since, e.g., the
effectiveness of climate protection programmes depends
to a critical degree on the economic planning of politicians,
multinational concerns and protagonists of the
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Fig. 1: Cartoon of the Global Subject as a
trinity of scientific assessment, global governance
and observation. Modern communication
technologies, scientific understanding,
and global co-operation might be seen as the
neural system of the Global Subject.
PIAM
Potsdam Integrated Assessment Modules
Project speaker: Carlo C. Jaeger
PIK project members: Ottmar Edenhofer, Rupert Klein,
Gerhard Petschel-Held.
Overview
The third generation of integrated assessments has to be
organized as a modular process. Within this structure,
modules are developed as separate units to be coupled in
accordance with the questions raised by decision-makers.
With well-defined interfaces between modules, a fruitful
competition between different modules becomes possible.
This is more productive than competition between
monolithic integrated assessment models and it promotes
co-operation between different disciplines and
different institutions.
financial markets. The projects in this TOPIK investigate
how the Global Subject may develop in order to
increase, i.a., the efficiency of global environmental management.
The tremendous progress made in all globalizing
technologies such as the internet and air traffic will
be the primary focus of attention here, but also of the
growing number of global environmental institutions
and organizations as well as the intensified dialogue
between scientific communities and decision-makers.
The Modular Approach
To assess problems of global environmental management,
often rather complicated integrated assessment
models are set up. Their features make them difficult to
comprehend, thus limiting both their potential use by
stakeholders and their further improvement by scientists.
To tackle this problem, PIAM aims at integrating comprehensible
modules in a comprehensible way.
PIAM has the potential to integrate different modelling
activities emerging in different PIK projects. To operationalize
its approach, PIAM has to tackle questions of
interface support, modularization and coupling of existing
modules. To accomplish its task, PIAM provides a
software platform with the following characteristics: