Visiting Research Fellow Roel Boumans Gives Talk at Symposium on Global Sustainability in Rome

Roel Boumans, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently gave a talk at the 3rd Symposium on Global Sustainability in Rome.

In his presentation, Boumans compared recent data with model scenarios from his Global Unified Metamodel of the Biosphere (GUMBO), developed in 2002 to simulate the integrated earth system and assess the dynamics and values of ecosystem services. Unlike other global models at the time, GUMBO included the dynamic feedbacks among human technology, economic production and welfare, and ecosystem goods and services within the earth system. At the time, the model simulated a range of future scenarios representing various assumptions about technological changes and investment strategies. In his talk, Boumans revisited these scenarios and used data from 2000 to the present to speculate about possible future trajectories.

The symposium, organized by the Laudato Si Institute for Process Systems Engineering and Sustainability at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest, explored recent advances in global sustainability across a wide range of relevant disciplines, including ecology, engineering, economics, theology, political science, and others.

At the Pardee Center, Boumans leads the Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) project with Faculty Research Fellows Les Kaufman and Suchi Gopal, which explores the connections and trade-offs between governance, social, and economic systems with natural systems.