Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), in collaboration with other entities, has launched GCAM-Europe, a new open-source tool that aims to boost European climate science. It is an expansion of the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM), a well-reputed integrated assessment model (IAM) widely used in global scenario analysis.
GCAM model accounts with technology-rich representations of the economy, energy sector, land use, and water linked to a climate model that can be used to explore climate change mitigation policies including carbon taxes, carbon trading, regulations and accelerated deployment of energy technology.

In the GCAM-Europe model, all 39 European countries are disaggregated into individual model regions for the energy and economic systems. Meanwhile, for the modelling of land and water systems, the model disaggregates Europe in 119 hydrographic basins. 

“Having this level of detail allows exploring the country-level effects of European policy packages or transformational strategies, as well as the potential international effects (e.g., carbon leakage) for a representative set of non-European regions over the world”, highlights Jon Sampedro, Ikerbasque researcher in BC3.

GCAM-Europe replaces the default (international) data sources for all newly defined European countries with Europe-specific data, such as energy statistics from Eurostat, whenever available. In terms of sector and technology coverage, the enhancements included in GCAM-Europe take advantage of the richness and greater level of detail of the data available for European countries.

“This level of detail at the national level allows for accurate modeling of European climate policy, the ability to achieve emissions reduction targets, and its potential social and environmental impacts”, adds Dirk-Jan Van de Ven, BC3 researcher. 

The model operates over a run period from 1990 to 2100 in five-year increments, producing projections of future energy supply and demand. These outputs include associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, radiative forcing, and climate impacts for 16 GHGs, aerosols, and short-lived climate forcers and depend on key scenario assumptions related to future population trends, economic development, technological change, and climate mitigation policies.

“The use of this new open-source model driven for and by the scientific community will allow the development of climate change science in new studies and publications”, underlines Clàudia Rodés, BC3 researcher. 

GCAM-Europe model is available in the following link: https://github.com/bc3LC-GCAMEurope/gcam-core