This volume of peer-reviewed chapters arose from a scientific meeting – the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum on Climate Change Impacts/Integrated Assessment (CCI/IA) – that has occurred annually now for 11 years during boreal summer in Snowmass, Colorado, under the leadership and direction of John Weyant. The concept for the CCI/IA meetings was developed by Richard Richels, Jae Edmonds, and Michael Schlesinger in October 1994 at the Third Japan–US Workshop on Global Change at the East–West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii. The objectives of these CCI/IA meetings were to improve: (1) the representation of the impacts of climate change in integrated assessment (IA) models, and (2) IA modeling of the climate-change problem by bringing together disciplinary experts from relevant scientific fields. A planning meeting was held in March 1995 at Dulles Airport. The first CCI/IA meeting was held in summer 1995, and the most recent meeting took place in summer 2005. The CCI/IA meetings have been sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute, the US Department of Energy, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the US National Science Foundation, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics, the ExxonMobil Corporation, the National Institute for Environmental Studies of Japan, and the European Commission.

The initial meeting in 1995 was organized under what turned out to be a rather naïve assumption that the climate-change impact-modeling community would show up and hand off a set of damage functions to the integrated assessment modelers, and then the two groups could part and continue on their independent research paths.