One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is to meet the global energy demand and at the same time to manage carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic environmental and socio-economic consequences. This challenge led to several proposals to stabilize CO2 atmospheric levels at specific targets both at regional and global scale.

    However, CO2 emissions are the results of several coupled processes that involve different systems such as energy, water, climate, agriculture, socio-economic system, policies and strategies implementation.  I developed a dynamical systems model (CLEARCO2) for studying interdependencies of climate impacts, energy development, resource requirements and impacts for the Sonoma County (CA) with focus on CO2 emissions.  CLEARCO2 integrates different sectors (energy, water, population, agriculture, industry, transportation), models renewable energy (RE) technologies insertion, optimizes the best energy mix based on oil price, CO2 taxes, and the RE capacities, and incorporates also an economic analysis. The main goals are to assess CO2 emissions, to simulate RE mixes and to study the impacts of different energy and transportation policy implementations.

I also developed an interface, which can  be exported as a web applet. The interface allows

to inform and engage the public and guide policy development concerning water and energy sustainability. Using the model interface users can run different energy and transportation scenarios, look at simulation running in real time, and compare different scenarios. 

In collaboration with my colleagues at LANL I have been also involved in developing an interacting web portal to interest, inform, enlist, and retain input from the Sonoma County citizenry. The CLEARCO2 is part of this web portal.