Carlo Jaeger (Chair European Climate Forum)

Human ecological systems range from tribes of hunters and gatherers in the savannah to today’s global society on the surface of planet Earth. There is a wide variety of approaches for modeling such systems, ranging from the venerable tradition of economic equilibrium models to recent models of complex adaptive systems. Unfortunately, both the knowledge claims and the proposals for action resulting from this range of models are often highly incoherent, and jeopardized by considerable conceptual confusion. In order to achieve a better understanding and more successful actions, it is useful to have a sound starting point for a comprehensive modeling strategy. I introduce such a starting point as follows. First, I characterize individual agents and social agents – in particular firms and households – as well as their shared environment in a social science language. Then, these entities are represented by suitable mathematical variables and functions. Next, it is shown how these mathematical representations can be implemented in computational terms. Finally, examples are given for how to proceed from this starting point.