Edvin Löthgren: Verifying and Introducing New Elements to Mean-Field Model of the Co-evolution of Climate Impact and Population Behaviour

Abstract:
Climate Change is a real threat to nature and human society alike and a collective change in behaviour of the world's population could help battling global warming. But, even though awareness is increasing many individuals still do not feel influenced enough to act appropriately. Using evolutionary game theory and population dynamics Frieswijk et al. suggests a model describing the intricate dynamics between human behaviour and climate change. Making a mean-field analysis for large populations of the model they show that globally the environmental impact versus the responsible behaviour converges to a limit cycle. This thesis recreates the model and attempts to verify the results but instead proves a contradiction. The original model was extended by introducing a tipping point property as well as analyse the case when the population network is not complete. When tipping points are present it is shown that no global convergence is possible while for a network
made up of disjoint complete graphs the system behaves much as in the original article.