Mathijs Harmsen, PBL Netherlands Environmental assessment agency
In the week of 7-11 July, 2025, PRISMA project, supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101081604, will host a summer school for a group of highly skilled students aimed at understanding the relevant aspects of climate impacts and equity, and how these are captured by integrated assessment models. The summer school is organized by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and will take place in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
As global and local climate impacts become more pronounced and the call for both mitigation and adaptation policies intensifies, so does the discussion about equity. This revolves around questions like: “who will suffer from impacts, who needs to pay for impacts and policies, who can benefit and how can we ensure a fair distribution?”. In recent years, there has also been an increasingly critical attitude towards IAM models, who allegedly tend to neglect the representation of these aspects in their scenarios. With this year’s summer school, PRISMA aims to provide a deep dive in all of these matters and to start a discussion among the next generation of researchers.
The student group consists of advanced doctoral students and early career scientists (e.g., early post-docs) from all over the world (Argentina, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, South Korea & Spain), whose research is focused on using computational methods to study environmental and climate related issues (for instance, energy system models, climate models, ecological models, macroeconomic models). They have been selected from >120 applicants and all have an impressive background and a relevant link to the topic.
The main aim of the summer school is to create a community of young scholars from a broad range of disciplines who have the potential to play an important role in the future of climate policy analysis. For the students themselves, it is also a great opportunity to learn about this highly timely topic from the leading experts in this field, most of whom are working within PRISMA: Prof. Dr. Detlef van Vuuren (PBL), Dr. Marina Andrijevic (IIASA), Dr. Nico Bauer (PIK), Dr. Elina
Brutschin (IIASA), Dr. Mark Dekker (PBL), Dr. Panagiotis Fragkos (E3M), Dr. Yann Robiou du Pont (UU), Dr. Bjarne Steffen
(ETH Zürich), Dr. Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst (UU).
The program will consist of lectures, interactive poster sessions where the students will be invited to present their
research or relevant work, hands-on sessions on the IAMs scenarios, group work on model development/analysis and
social events. Key topics will include: The need for representing and improving climate impacts and equity in models,
Fair regional burden sharing in global climate policy, Climate impacts, Climate change adaptation, Maladaptation and adaptive capacity, Climate litigation and influential climate court cases, Gender inequality in climate impacts and climate policy and Climate finance.
PRISMA project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101081604.