The ICLIPS Impacts Tool: Presenting climate impact response functions for integrated assessments of climate change

The ICLIPS model is an integrated assessment model of climate change that links global climate change with regional impacts and mitigation efforts by integrating components from different disciplines and various spatial scales. Its reduced–form impact module consists of climate impact response functions (CIRFs) that depict the regional sensitivity of selected climate–sensitive impact sectors to changes in important climatic and atmospheric drivers. In addition to enabling the specification of maximum “tolerable” impacts of climate change in a tolerable windows analysis with the ICLIPS model, the CIRFs are also a valuable information source in their own right. In this paper, I present the ICLIPS Impacts Tool, a software tool that provides convenient access to a large number (ca. 100,000) of CIRF diagrams for a wide range of impact indicators, geographical regions, and climate projections. The choice of Java as programming language enables the ICLIPS Impacts Tool to run on most computer platforms, including MicrosoftWindows, Linux, Solaris and AIX. This paper provides an introduction into the CIRF concept and presents the main features of the ICLIPS Impacts Tool.