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The overall goal of ENSEMBLES is to maintain and extend European pre-eminence in the provision of policy relevant information on climate and climate change and its interactions with society.

The overall goal of ENSEMBLES is to maintain and extend European pre-eminence in the provision of policy relevant information on climate and climate change and its interactions with society. This will be done by:

  • Developing an ensemble prediction system based on the principal state-of-the-art, high resolution, global and regional Earth System models developed in Europe,
  • Quantifying and reducing the uncertainty in the representation of physical, chemical, biological and human-related (social and economic) feedbacks in the Earth System (including water resource, land use, and air quality issues, and carbon cycle feedbacks).
  • Maximising the exploitation of the results by linking the outputs of the ensemble prediction system to a range of applications, including agriculture, health, food security, energy, water resources, insurance and weather risk management.

Most importantly, ENSEMBLES ensures that these goals are all taken forward in an integrated and co-ordinated way.

FEEM is active within Research Theme 7 on “Scenarios and Policy Implications” whose purpose is to integrate scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions, land use change and adaptive capacity, with and without greenhouse gas emission reduction policies, and to test their sensitivity to climatic-change pressures.

Specific objectives of FEEM in RT7 are:

  • to provide scenarios of anthropogenic emissions and economic development;
  • to assess economcally climate change impacts, this interfacing environmental and economic models;
  • to test the sensitivity of scenarios, especially of emissions and land use patterns, to those impacts.

In the first phase of the work FEEM set up a dynamic computable general equilibrium model with particular emphasis on the energy sector, then produced development and emission scenarios, assessed climate change impacts on the economic systems and finally tested the feedback on emissions and land uses. The work of interfacing physical and economic impact models is still in progress.