Reflections and conclusions: Geographical models to address grand challenges

This chapter provides some general reflections on the development of ABM in terms of the applications presented in this book. We focus on the dilemma of building rich models that tend to move the field from strong to weaker styles of prediction, raising issues of validation in environments of high diversity and variability. We argue that we need to make progress on these issues while at the same time extending our models to deal with cross-cutting issues that define societal grand challenges such as climate change, energy depletion, aging, migration, security, and a host of other global issues. We pick up various pointers to how we might best use models in a policy context that have been introduced in many of the applications presented within this book and we argue that in the future, we need to develop a more robust approach to how we might use such models in policy making and planning.