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A primary objective of the project is to estimate socio-economic impacts arising from global changes by using economic models. The consortium is endowed with a large set of state-of-the-art, internationally renown, modeling tools, that will be further expanded and enriched to focus on key areas of research such as agriculture, forestry, land use, energy, EU competitiveness, labor, international trade. Theoretical innovations concerning discounting, risk and ambiguity will be developed and tested numerically with models.

Today, the world is transforming itself, socially, economically and
environmentally. We can think of these transformations together as the process
of ‘global change’: doing so emphasises the increasing interactions between
them. But what are the impacts of these interconnected global changes, in the
EU and beyond, and what are the best policy responses to manage them?

The objectives of Global-IQ are three-fold:

  • to significantly advance the
    estimation of the socio-economic impacts of global challenges, at the global,
    European and national scales
  • to identify optimal adaptation strategies;
  • to evaluate the total costs of managing global changes and the optimal mix of
    adaptation and mitigation.

The consortium lead by Toulouse School of Economics – where FEEM is deputy coordinator – is endowed with a large set of state-of-the-art, internationally renown, economic modeling tools, that will be further expanded and enriched to estimate socio-economic impacts arising from global changes. The research will focus on key areas such as: agriculture, forestry, land use, energy, EU competitiveness, labor, and international trade. Furthermore theoretical innovations concerning discounting, risk and ambiguity will be developed and tested numerically with models.

Global- IQ aims to buld an interdisciplinary, system overview of global change. This involves a common learning process for the project partners in charge of quantifying global impacts in the other work packages. This learning process
share assumptions about and projections of four global challenges:
climate change, non-renewable energy resource depletion, environmental threats, and global competition/interdependence.

Since fall 2011, partners began on one side the design ofthe Global-IQ conceptual framework through a wiki platform, developing and fine-tuning shared assumptions about future socio-economic pathways, and beginning to identify the particular mitigation and adaptation responses to global challenges.

On the other side, the consortium completed the inventory of all Global-IQ models and variables, their characteristics such as spatial, temporal resolution and major assumptions and the definition of the theoretical framework for studying total costs of, and adaptation to, the global challenges. For the latter, two “framework papers” have been drafted to guide future work in the project: the first one defines concepts and methods to estimate the total cost of global challenges, while the second starts from defining adaptation from a conceptual point of view and then provides guidelines for how modellers should run scenarios with and without it.

For more detailed information about the project’s structure, objectives, and results available so far, please download the first Global-IQ Annual Newsletter.