GCIMS – Global Change Intersectoral Modeling System

Interactions between human and natural systems are at the heart of many economic, environmental, and national security issues facing the United States and the world today. Understanding and accounting for these interactions poses challenges because human and natural systems evolve over time in response to a wide range of short- and long-term influences. Understanding these complex dynamics requires innovative tools that can represent not only the fundamental drivers of change and responses of individual systems, but also how different systems interact and co-evolve.

The goal of the Global Change Intersectoral Modeling System (GCIMS) scientific focus area is improving the understanding of the complex interactions among energy, water, land, climate, socioeconomics, and other important human and natural systems at regional to global and seasonal to centennial scales. GCIMS has an emphasis on developing and applying an internally consistent, open-source, and computationally efficient modeling framework that captures the evolution of the integrated human–Earth system. The GCIMS team seeks to simultaneously resolve the effects of:

• compounding short- and long-term influences on energy, water, land, climate, and socioeconomic systems over the next 10–100 years;
• the responses of these systems to those influences; and
• previously unresolved feedbacks that fundamentally alter the frequency or intensity of influences.