On Sept. 28, 2026, the PRISMA project hosted a webinar on how Integrated Assessment Models are bridging biodiversity and climate policy. Read below to discover more about it.
Presentation: Bridging climate and biodiversity in Integrated Assessment Models
Speaker: Cindy Azuero, CMCC, Italy
Key takeaways:
- IAMs have already contributed to bridging biodiversity and climate policy by addressing questions such as: How does mitigation affect biodiversity? How to think about conservation in the context of climate change? How does biodiversity policy affect climate? And how does climate-driven biodiversity loss affect human well-being?
- IAMs still have work to do to address how biodiversity can support climate change adaptation.
- From a modeling perspective, IAMs need to broaden their scope to include missing drivers of biodiversity loss (e.g. pollutants), represent freshwater and marine ecosystems, and close the loop by better representing how the economic system depends on nature.
Summary of the presentation
The presentation described how Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have incorporated biodiversity, and the types of policy-relevant research questions, at the intersection of the biodiversity loss and climate change crises, to which they have contributed. It explained how Detailed-process IAMs, by combining a post-processing approach with spatially explicit biodiversity models and indicators, have helped answer how mitigation affects biodiversity, how to think about conservation in the context of climate change, and how biodiversity policy affects climate. Reduced-form IAMs, in contrast, rely on a more aggregated approach based on damage functions to endogenize biodiversity impacts, and have mainly contributed to answering how climate-driven biodiversity loss affects human well-being.
The presentation also flagged where IAMs still fall short: they have yet to capture how biodiversity supports adaptation, have so far focused almost exclusively on terrestrial ecosystems (leaving out freshwater and marine systems), omit other drivers of biodiversity loss such as pollutants, and do not yet fully represent how biodiversity status feeds back into economic decisions.
Q&A summary
Several questions probed why IAMs have concentrated on terrestrial ecosystems. The answer is largely historical: these models are already linked to land-use modules, while equivalent modules for freshwater and marine ecosystems are generally missing. Terrestrial ecosystems were a logical starting point, and extending the models beyond them is the next step.
On geographic scope, participants asked whether the framework applies to the Global South. Since the IAMs discussed are global models, they do in principle cover both the Global North and the Global South. However, the biodiversity models that feed into them depend on biodiversity data, which is more abundant and of higher quality for the Global North — introducing a data bias. There are also important opportunities around nature-based solutions, particularly in tropical countries, that models should better account for.
A related question raised the risk of missing relevant research published outside English. The review focused on understanding how biodiversity has been represented in a specific subset of IAMs, and while there are relatively few such models from the Global South, any that exist and were published in a language other than English would indeed have been missed.
On climate adaptation, the panel confirmed this remains one of the main gaps: Detailed-process IAMs are currently working to improve how adaptation itself is represented, and once that representation matures, its integration with biodiversity can be developed further.
Finally, asked whether impact models from IPCC Working Group II that incorporate biodiversity metrics could inspire IAM research under Working Group III, the speaker noted that the literature reviewed has mostly skipped biodiversity indicators in favor of ecosystem services. One exception cited was Bastien-Olvera et al. (2023), which integrates spatially explicit information from a Dynamic Global Vegetation Model to calibrate damage functions — though it still stops short of using biodiversity indicators directly.
Watch the recording: https://youtu.be/2FN0kTv-_RE
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101081604 – PRISMA. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.