Adaptive Policy Design to Reduce Carbon Emissions: A System-of-Systems Perspective

This paper presents an adaptive policy design approach based on a system-of-systems (SoS) perspective. Using a case of carbon emissions reduction in the residential sector, the SoS perspective is used as a way to structure the policy issue into interdependent relevant systems. This representation of the system provides a framework to test a large number of hypotheses about the evolution of the system's performance using computational experiments. In particular, in a situation where the realized emission level misses the intermediate target, policies can be adapted to meet the policy target. Our approach shows the different policy designs that decision-makers can envision to influence the overall system performance.

I. Introduction

In application areas such as environmental and energy systems, the increasingly complex and uncertain nature of the problems under study can pose significant methodological challenges for research. To address such challenges, a systems-level approach is urgently needed [1]. Two major shifts are from system to system-of-systems thinking and from optimal to adaptive.