Effectively assessing the socioeconomic impact of global changes

With EU funding, the GLOBAL-IQ (Impacts quantification of global changes) project used the information gained to identify global change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Climate change and demographic and labour market developments were of particular interest. Project partners employed quantitative and modelling approaches to estimate the economic costs and benefits of global change.

Existing knowledge on global trends, change drivers, uncertainties and cross-impacts between demography, economy, environment and resources (climate, land and water) were reviewed. This is in addition to reviews on airborne pollution, renewable energy microgeneration by households and emissions mitigation in developing countries.

These key areas or sectors were used to further expand and enhance the modelling tools by examining the socioeconomic impacts of global changes and determining related adaptation strategies.

Various scenarios concerning the socioeconomic impacts of global changes at EU, national and regional levels were compared in order to determine the effects of different changes. The team calculated the total cost of different combinations of global changes by using economic models.

The socioeconomic transformations in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, energy, transport, infrastructure and tourism were defined. This enabled project members to identify the optimal combination of mitigation/adaptation strategies and to ultimately assess the overall cost of adapting to the global changes.

Lastly, novel theories on risk and ambiguity were developed and tested with the enhanced modelling tools. The theories assist stakeholders when analysing policies to mitigate and adapt to global change.

GLOBAL-IQ provided much needed insight into the effects of interconnected global changes in the EU and beyond, and offered the most advantageous policy responses to manage them.