The future interaction of science and innovation policy for climate change and national security

Abstract

Recent efforts to characterize the interactions among climate change and national security issues raise challenges of relating disparate bodies of scientific (both physical and social) knowledge as well as determining the role of innovation in meeting these challenges. Technological innovation has been called for to combat climate change, increase food production, and discover new ways of generating energy, and proposals for increased investments in R&D and technology deployment are to be met with everywhere. However, such policy decisions in one domain have impacts in other domains-often unexpected, often negative, but often capable of being addressed in planning stages. This technological tool allows its users to embody the knowledge of different domains, to keep that knowledge up to date, and to define relationships, via both a model and an analytic game, such that policy makers can foresee problems and plan to forestall or mitigate them. Capturing and dynamically updating knowledge is the accomplishment of the Knowledge Encapsulation Framework. A systems dynamic model, created in STELLA ® , simulates the relationships among different domains, so that relevant knowledge is applied to a seemingly independent issue. An analytic game provides a method to use that knowledge as it might be used in real-world settings.

Combining modeling and gaming for predictive analytics

“…In our prior work, we constructed a prototype game to demonstrate use of System-Dynamics models related to climate change and crop production in a game designed to consider human interactions at a political level [13]. The underlying models were built and run using the STELLA Wa modeling system, which provides a simulation engine for executing models paired with a graphical interface for constructing, parameterizing, and running models as well as visualizing outputs.…”