SuCCESs – a global IAM for exploring the interactions between energy, materials, land use, and climate systems in long-term scenarios (model version 2024-10-23)

Abstract

SuCCESs (Sustainable Climate Change mitigation strategies in Energy–land–material Systems) is a bottom-up integrated assessment model (IAM) that represents energy production and use, materials production, land use, and climate globally. The primary use case for SuCCESs is to calculate long-term scenarios until 2100 that consider the interactions between these systems, for example, the greenhouse gas emissions from energy, materials, and land use and their impact on climate change. The four systems are hard-linked in SuCCESs, and scenarios are solved through intertemporal optimization by minimizing discounted system costs to satisfy projected demand and other constraints, e.g. climate targets. This yields a long-term equilibrium solution between the modelled systems. This article introduces the model logic and structure, describes the overall representation of each system, and provides an evaluation by comparing the scenarios produced by SuCCESs with different end-of-century radiative forcing targets to those from other IAMs. Towards this end and to demonstrate the capability of SuCCESs for large-scale scenario exploration, we also conduct a sensitivity analysis employing Monte Carlo sampling with a 1000-member scenario ensemble for each radiative forcing target. Lastly, we discuss some practical aspects and different ways of using the model in long-term scenario analyses.