Earth Fortunes

Earth Fortunes is a playful journey to explore some of the ways energy systems can affect our lives. You might be excited, worried, or unsure about future energy systems.

In the FluxKit, this will take the form of a mini divination station modeled on the 5 Shared Socioeconomic Pathways or SSPs.

For SQUARE, the cards are available to explore on your own.

If you don’t have a kit, you can still access the Augmented Reality (AR) fortunes!

To access the fortune-teller point your phone camera at the QR code in the centre image below. (And scroll down to follow the instructions.)

Then point your smartphone camera at one of these cards:

Energy Modelling

The graphs and values reported in this kit were developed by consulting with a computer model called GCAM: the Global Change Analysis Model. GCAM relates energy, land, water, climate, agriculture, and economic systems all at once. The model can take any set of assumptions to simulate future pathways that can detail everything from electricity generation to water demand

Model decisions are primarily driven by supply, demand, and prices. Real conditions are more complicated, though, so the model is calibrated for historical periods and results are tuned to ensure that model results are reasonable.

Accessing Augmented Reality (AR)

The AR component can be accessed via QR code by any smartphone or tablet connected to the internet and your experience will be augmented when your device’s camera ‘sees’ an image it recognizes (in this case the centre cards). You will hear the fortune teller whisper your future (so turn up the volume or use headphones), Keep reading to find out more about the science behind the predictions.

Fortunes: The Shared Sustainable Pathways (SSPs)

The centre cards explained by fortune tellers are based on the 5 Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which describe possible directions the future could take.

Scientific basis for the Earth Fortunes - Integrated Assessment and GCAM

We hear daily about “systems” and how they affect everything in our daily lives: our government, energy supply and consumption, local and global economies, school and health systems, the global climate, watersheds and rivers, water treatment and distribution systems, food production and processing, social welfare, and so on. Systems are everywhere! But what are SSPs, and how do they work?

A not-very-exciting and rather vague definition is that a system “is a set of interconnected components that work together to perform a task or set of tasks”. From a “bird’s eye view”, this description covers our whole world: energy, agriculture, water resources, mining and forestry, manufacturing, climate, buildings, transportation, population, economic activities, and so on all interact to create the world we live in. More locally, we see the same system components interacting in our cities, provinces and countries. These systems are both very complicated and very complex.

We can understand them by studying different system “pieces” or “components”, which has been the most common approach (physics, economics, biology, political science, language and culture, chemistry, engineering, medicine, and so on). We can also try to understand how they interact, which is a newer area of research called “systems sciences” or the “systems approach”. A common approach to achieve this greater understanding is computer simulation.

Integrated assessment models (IAM) are “systems simulation models” that support sustainable resource development and infrastructure planning, which requires reliable long-term projections of both resource supply and demand variables. Such projections rest in turn on a clear understanding both of the problem and potential trade-offs, as well as the comprehensive, “big picture” effects of alternative solutions. The IAM proposed for use here, the “Global Change Assessment Model” (GCAM), represents both the behaviour of and interactions between primary and secondary energy supply and demand, the economy, water supply and demand, agricultural production, land use, and the climate – a system-wide perspective that includes both these intersectoral connections, as well as a consistent representation of international trading and policy linkages and their evolution over 100 years under various scenarios. Canada lacks a comprehensive IAM that integrates our country with global systems, and that can simulate broader effects – on energy systems, the climate, land use and water resources – of policy decisions.

In each simulation run, GCAM takes as input a set of scenario assumptions to produce outputs in terms of prices, energy production and transformations, and commodity and other flows across regions and times. Of particular interest for the Future Energy Systems initiative, GCAM represents sources of primary energy supply, modes of energy transformation, and energy service demands – including transportation, industrial energy use, and residential and commercial energy service demands. Supplies and demands for primary and secondary energy forms are simulated, as well as emissions of greenhouse and other gases, and bioenergy demands connect to agriculture and land systems, as well as to the water system. GCAM is a community model and an important international tool for scientific inquiry; hundreds of academic papers using

GCAM have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals over the last 30 years (JGCRI, http://jgcri.github.io/gcam-doc/overview.html