Publications

Climate change adaptation investment decisions can be made more efficiently if uncertainty and new information are considered in their economic appraisal. Real options analysis (ROA) is a robust decision-making tool that allows for the incorporation of both uncertainty and new information. In this opinion article, we argue that ROA is a valuable tool, providing the […]

By going through the transitions in cell evolution and energy regimes, evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler explains the dynamics behind the formation of the metabolic activity and complexity of our planet...

“Meeting User Needs for Sea Level Rise Information: A Decision Analysis Perspective” Despite widespread efforts to implement climate services, there is almost no literature that systematically analyzes users’ needs. This paper addresses this gap by applying a decision analysis perspective to identify what kind of mean sea level rise (SLR) information is needed for local […]

For the long-term management of coastal flood risks, investment and policy strategies need to be developed in the light of the full range of uncertainties associated with mean sea-level rise (SLR). This, however, remains a challenge due to deep uncertainties involved in SLR assessments, many ways of representing uncertainties, and a lack of common terminology […]

This study proposes an agent-based model to investigate major stakeholders behaviors in the housing market. The proposed model mimics the heterogeneous behaviors of individual buyers and sellers in a housing market considering bounded rationality. The simulation results of case study in Shanghai are robust and reproduce stylized facts including as volatility clustering, absence of autocorrelations, […]

The targets of the Paris Agreement make it necessary to redirect finance flows towards sustainable, low-carbon infrastructures and technologies. Currently, the potential of institutional investors to help finance this transition is widely discussed. Thus, this paper takes a closer look at influence factors for green investment decisions of large European insurance companies. With a mix […]

The Global Climate Forum and Fraunhofer IEE have published a perspective on a digital structure of the energy transition in the journal “GAIA – Ecological Perspectives for Science and Society”. The work described in the article is conducted within the Kopernikus project ENavi which develops a navigation system that helps to identify and tackle critical […]

Klaus Lucas, Ortwin Renn, Carlo Jaeger and Saini Yang build on a domain-overarching definition of systemic risks by highlighting crucial properties that distinguish them from conventional risks and plain disasters. They place emphasis on the role of complexity science as a basis for unifying the phenomena of systemic risks in widely different domains. Published in […]

Up to 30 per cent of coastal wetlands could be lost globally by the year 2100 with a dramatic effect on global warming and coastal flooding, if action is not taken to protect them, new research warns. The global study, led by researchers at the University of Lincoln, UK, suggests that the future of global […]

Klaus Lucas (Institute of Technical Thermodynamics), Ortwin Renn (Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies) and Carlo Jaeger (GCF) give a review of how insights form complexity science can be applied to the domain of systemic risks. They have identified four major properties of systemic risks: they are (1) transboundary in nature, (2) highly interconnected and intertwined […]