GCAM-Gym: A Benchmark for AI-Driven Climate Policy Design

Comparing climate-policy search methods requires accounting for differences in policy control, available observations, feedback timing, and simulator budgets. We introduce GCAM-Gym, a Gymnasium-compatible environment that supports full-policy evaluation and stepwise control through a common interface and exposes the components of the policy objective. We compare seven search and control systems in three settings: target attainment and cost, cost-temperature trade-offs, and one-step delayed feedback. Each system is evaluated with ten seeds per setting, for a total of 3,210 attempted GCAM evaluations. Four systems share a budget of 24 attempts per seed; among these, CMA-ES achieves the highest interquartile mean (IQM) of the best returns from completed policy evaluations in all three settings. We release the evaluation archive and analysis tools to reconstruct the reported comparisons without running GCAM. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICLR-GCAM-GYM.