Summary

The purpose of the CAVES project is to couple policy concerns for complex human-environmental systems with linked physical, biological and social models based soundly in complexity science. We will produce a constructive demonstration of modelling procedures for the formation of social policy in conditions of uncertainty due to complexity.

To do so, we will develop a set of case studies of land use change driven by a variety of physical, biological and sociopolitical phenomena. These case studies will provide extensive qualitative and quantitative evidence that will constrain clusters of agent based models to be implemented for each case study. The models in each of these clusters will include rich cognitive specifications of agents representing different stakeholders and models with more agents but simpler representations of cognition. Some models will aggregate stakeholder groups. Others will abstract from the detail of the case studies in order to provide simpler models that may yield some closed form solutions.

The CAVES project is funded under the EU 6FP NEST programme.