Sponsor: Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) (A cooperative agreement with MCC in collaboration with Auckland University of Technology and Industrial Economics, Inc.)

Duration: 3 years

Abstract: Climate change presents a growing threat to economic development, exacerbating existing constraints to growth and creating new ones. It is increasingly important to incorporate climate and environmental considerations into constraints analysis and development decisions. Toward that end, we aim to support development planning by enhancing and utilizing our "impact channels" economic-biophysical modeling framework and facilitating its application to new counties. This framework is designed to estimate the impacts of environmental changes (including interactions with climate), as well as the effects of policies and adaptive actions, on economic growth at national (i.e. GDP) and sectoral levels under a wide range of scenarios. We seek to partner with MCC to facilitate the broad application of this framework and to make a greater impact by informing investment decisions. Within this partnership, we aim to demonstrate how our framework can support MCC analysis (e.g. CA and RCA), advance understanding of growth constraints in the climate-environmental space, and contribute to the public good by providing new scientific knowledge, useful analysis, and an open source modeling framework that can be broadly accessed and applied in support of sustainable development.