Climate change represents one of the most complex challenges of the 21st century, with profound implications for ecosystems, human health, and socio-economic systems. At the IAMC Lab, research on climate change focuses on the integration of climate, energy, and economic models to assess the long-term impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and the effectiveness of mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Our work combines integrated assessment modeling, simple climate models (such as FaIR – https://docs.fairmodel.net/en/latest/), and optimization techniques to explore pathways consistent with global temperature targets, evaluate cost-effective mitigation portfolios, and quantify co-benefits for air quality and health.
APPLICATIONS
Optimal Strategies for Climate Change Mitigation
Michele Francesco Arrighini, Claudio Marchesi, Laura Zecchi, Marialuisa Volta, (2024). IFAC-PapersOnLine, 58(2), 80-85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2024.07.095.
ABSTRACT: This work explores methods to address climate change by applying optimization techniques in a top-down approach. A decision model is proposed to minimize temperature anomalies compared to pre-industrial levels between 2025 and 2100 by varying greenhouse gases (GHG), namely CO2 and CH4. Two objective functions are minimized. The first one considers the overall sum of the temperature anomalies by 2100, while the latter minimizes the temperature anomaly at the end of the century. Two different emission trends are assumed: a gradual (gaussian) fall in emissions or a fast (exponential) decline. The reduction of GHG emissions is constrained to a set of IPCC scenarios identified by assessing economic, social, and technological trends in the next decades. The uncertainty analysis of the decision problem solutions suggests that temperature anomalies can be limited to the range of 0.8–2°C. Copyright © 2024 The Authors.
KEYWORDS: Climate Change; IAM; Carbon Dioxide; Optimization
A top-down approach for climate change mitigation strategies
Claudio Marchesi, Michele Francesco Arrighini, Laura Zecchi, Marialuisa Volta, (2025). IFAC Journal of Systems and Control, 31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacsc.2025.100297.
ABSTRACT: This research examined the effects of various GHG reduction policies on climate change via optimization techniques using a top-down approach. The aim was to examine how different aspects of policies to reduce CO2 and CH4 emissions would affect changes in temperature compared to pre-industrial levels from 2025 to 2100. The proposed top-down approach allows for the investigation of several factors that may influence the results: (i) the objective function, (ii) the reduction pathway, and (iii) the starting point of the optimization. Two different objective functions were minimized: the overall sum of the temperature between 2025–2100 and the value at 2100. The results were also compared in terms of the reduction trajectories: two different emission trends were assumed: a gradual (gaussian) fall in emissions or a fast (exponential) decline, starting in 2025, in 2030, and in 2035. The mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was limited to a certain range of scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These scenarios were determined by analyzing economic, social, and technical developments expected to occur in the next few decades. The analysis also included the interaction in global warming of air pollutant emission variations due to climate policies. The results revealed that exponential trajectories, depending on the initial year, can facilitate the stabilization of global temperatures below 1.5 °C. In contrast, gaussian trajectories were more likely to overtake this threshold if implementation is delayed beyond 2025. Copyright © 2025 The Authors.
KEYWORDS: Climate change; Air quality; IAM; Carbon dioxide; Optimization