Scientific objectives

The climate sciences community has made a considerable work through the IPCC reports to describe the climate challenge faced by humanity. It appears now that the research load will involve more and more the social sciences and humanities communities. But as emphasized before, global changes studies should not confine themselves to climate change as the unique globalization challenge faced by humanity. Social scientists have more generally to assess the consequences of global changes upon our societies as a whole while contributing to policy action both to mitigate the impacts of climate change and identify the most relevant adaptation strategies in the environmental domain.

The objective of Global IQ is to provide significant advances in these two directions from the viewpoint of the economist’s community. Economics of globalization is a prominent research topic in contemporary economics. Economics of climate change is also an area of intense research since twenty years especially in Europe. The publication of the Stern Review has been the corner stone of these research efforts, bringing to a large audience the conclusion that present action was needed now, the cost of action being much lower than the costs of inaction in terms of adverse impacts of the future climate upon the well being of humanity. However much remains to be done in this research area both to strengthen the reliability of the Stern Review conclusions and to help design the best policy options for present action in the broader perspective of global changes. To contribute to this overall objective we plan research actions in several directions.