Focus Areas
The research activities of the Joint Program are highly integrated with specific projects and analyses leveraging the development of methods and models across the coordinated effort.
It is useful to identify several broad areas of inquiry that characterize the Program's core focus. A brief description of each focus area can be viewed by selecting from the list below:
- Integration of Earth System Components, Including Human Systems
- Uncertainty in Earth System Components and the Implications for Risks of Serious Climate Change
- Mitigation Policy Studies, Cost Analysis, and Policy Design
- Technology, Technical Change and Issues of the Scale of the New Energy Systems
- Impacts of Climate and Environmental Change, Adaptation, and Feedbacks on the Climate System
- Links of Conventional Air Pollution to Climate, Environmental Impacts, and Mitigation
- Improved Estimation of Earth System Responses
In each of these areas the Program has made a substantial contribution to scientific understanding and to the development of policy. Key publications and highlights of achievements to date are identified in each area, accessible here.
Some current examples of our research activities include:
- Program scientists are examining human drivers of and responses to climate change, and the processes that could lead to abrupt and dangerous change.
- We are exploring current policies aimed at stabilizing global warming and evaluating the potential performance of proposed regulations, in regions around the world.
- We are determining the cost, efficiency, and unintended consequences of alternatives to fossil fuels.
- Scientists are incorporating new understanding of the climate system into an Earth system model that simulates how the ocean, atmosphere, and terrestrial ecosystems are affected by human activities.