In October 24, MEDEAS project organized a workshop in the World Resource Forum 2017 at Geneva, in order to introduce the MEDEAS model and scenarios at world level, discuss the preliminary results with the participants of the WRF and obtain their feedback.
The workshop spanned 2 hours with great success and the main topics covered were, among others, the availability of MEDEAS open source model, the scenarios used as a framework for guiding the transition to a low carbon economy, the MEDEAS model structure and main hypotheses and the preliminary results.
This was an excellent forum to share MEDEAS project, where leaders and other change agents from government, business, research and NGOs attended.
The main points discussed included:
- Availability of the MEDEAS source model and terms of use and conditions, licenses.
- Seneca cliff. Three equations models have the ability to capture the rapid decline in resources production. Simple models can help to understand the behavior in more complex/detailed models.
- MEDEAS scenarios. Scenarios as a framework for guiding the transition to a low carbon economy. The importance of considering the CO2 emissions in the energy transition. SSP2 scenario as the MEDEAS Business as Usual scenario.
- MEDEAS model structure and main hypotheses: Feedback between energy resources and the economy: how to combine Input-Output Tables with system dynamics models.
- MEDEAS preliminary results. Importance to consider the energy consumed. The importance of considering cooling from non-electric systems. Renewable energy sources limits: a key issue to be analyzed.
The discussions with the attendees resulted in the following main conclusions:
- MEDEAS is an open source, community based suit of models: World (available online from February 2018), Europe, Austria and Bulgaria.
- MEDEAS scenarios are used as a framework for guiding the transition to a low carbon economy. Such scenarios are aligned with the IPCC, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and are considering carbon budget and CO2 emissions for the different scenarios till 2050.
- Renewable energy sources limits is a key issue to be analyzed. The model can show the interactions between energy sources and mineral use together with climate change impacts.
- Feedback between energy resources and economy can be examined through the combination of Input-Output Tables with system dynamics models.
More information on the workshop can be found here , while the official site of the WRF 2017 can be found here.