Abstract:

The interdependencies between the environment, the economy and the social system are very complex. The economic development produces pressures on the environment, which reduces the ecosystem services of nature with strong feedbacks on the economy and the social system. The necessary “Great Transformation” in human behavior that avoids these developments will only be reached by policy intervention. An efficient policy needs very detailed information about the described interdependencies, which can only be achieved by the application of complex models. The paper at hand analyses the requirements that have to be fulfilled by such models, which imply that suitable socio-economic models and natural science models have to be linked. The paper further presents the model GINFORS as an example of a suitable socio-economic system and discusses the linkage with the global vegetation model LPJmL as part of the EU project POLFREE.