MAPS - Models, Assessment, and Policies for Sustainability

MAPS aims to broaden the range of policies, models, and assessments to help achieve sustainability, equity, and human well-being. The lack of evidence for sufficient absolute decoupling between economic growth and environmental pressures suggests that future trajectories built on economic growth may not be possible. There is an urgent need for a new paradigm that reconciles human well being with environmental sustainability -- one based on a “post-growth” approach. The idea is that high-income countries should move beyond the pursuit of GDP growth as a policy goal, and instead pursue policies that improve human well-being while reducing resource use. Despite increasing interest in this idea, the main integrated assessment models (IAMs) used in climate mitigation modelling do not consider post-growth policies or scenarios. MAPS has the ambition to expand the range of policy options available to policymakers and incorporate post-growth scenarios into the major scientific assessments of the IPCC and IPBES. Our goal is to provide new approaches to help steer Europe and the world back within planetary boundaries without compromising on valuable social welfare goals. To this end, MAPS will use participatory processes to develop new policy packages and scenarios, and then assess these policies using a state-of-the art simulation model. In particular, it will estimate the resource use requirements of a good life, design social welfare systems that are growth-resilient, incorporate a broader range of environmental and social indicators into assessment models, and explore how alternative policies could be implemented in practice. MAPS will provide knowledge about policies that reduce resource use to be within planetary boundaries while maintaining or improving social outcomes. In so doing, it will improve decision-making capacity by broadening the range of policy options, modelling frameworks, and assessments for sustainability.