Fit for purpose? Building and evaluating a fast, integrated model for exploring water policy pathways

Exploring adaptation pathways is an emerging approach for supporting decision making under uncertain changing conditions. An adaptation pathway is a sequence of policy actions to reach specified objectives. To develop adaptation pathways, interactions between environment and policy response need to be analysed over time for an ensemble of plausible futures. A fast, integrated model can facilitate this. Here, we describe the development and evaluation of such a model, an Integrated Assessment Metamodel (IAMM), to explore adaptation pathways in the Rhine delta for a decision problem currently faced by the Dutch Government. The theory-motivated metamodel is a simplified physically based model. Closed questions reflecting the required accuracy were used to evaluate the model's fitness. The results show that such a model fits the purpose of screening and ranking of policy options and pathways to support the strategic decision making. A complex model can subsequently be used to obtain more detailed information. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-SA license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).