This is FRIDA

Abstract. FRIDA is a new contribution to the portfolio of integrated assessment models (IAMs) that address the climate – energy – economy – and society nexus. The FRIDA acronym stands for Feedback-based knowledge Repository for IntegrateD Assessments. By naming it a "knowledge repository" we signal that the FRIDA model is never finished; it represents the current state of knowledge of the development team at any given time. We aim to continually integrate new scientific findings to keep the FRIDA up to date.

FRIDA comes with a learning environment that, together with the model's low computational cost, makes it a useful tool for education. It can be used in the classroom setting in interdisciplinary climate science courses and will allow students to understand how their discipline is intricately woven into the rest of the climate science disciplines. This feature set makes FRIDA accessible to a wider range of users than just researchers and scientists. Our aim is to lower the barrier to entry of using this model so that even lay people are able to use the model to build an understanding of the interconnectedness of climate and humans. Additionally, the low computational burden allows for uncertainty exploration by varying model parameters.

In this collection of papers in the Geoscientific Model Development (GMD) journal we intend to document the developments of FRIDA, from its origin in the years 2023–2026 within the European Horizon project "WorldTrans – Transparent Assessments for Real People" (FRIDA version 2.1 and FRIDA V3); and (hopefully) future versions that the spirited (and growing) development team will hopefully ensure. The intention of this brief introductory paper is to provide the contextual framework for the original model, and to explicitly state the original requirements.