What is IEEM?

Integrated economic-environmental analysis is used to support evidence-based public policy and investment design. We have pioneered the integration of natural capital and ecosystem services in the macroeconomic tools used by Central Banks, Finance Ministries and Multilateral Institutions through the development of the Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling (IEEM) Platform linked with spatial land use land cover change and ecosystem services modeling.

The value-added of IEEM over conventional analysis is: (i) its integration of detailed environmental information through the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting to represent the economy and the environment in a comprehensive and inter-connected way; (ii) the indicators IEEM generates are those demanded by policy makers including Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment and poverty, but also metrics of wealth, natural capital, and ecosystem service supply, and; (iii) IEEM’s environmental modeling modules capture the dynamics of natural capital-based sectors while IEEM’s linkage with spatial ecosystem service modeling enables estimation of impacts on the future flow of market and non-market ecosystem services.

IEEM has been applied to thousands of policy questions globally. IEEM is a forward-looking framework that is used to answer ‘what if’ questions that span economic sectors (e.g., energy, infrastructure, agriculture, and tourism) and themes (e.g., climate change, sustainable development goals, and fiscal sustainability), such as what would be the economic and environmental impact of moving toward my country’s Nationally Determined Commitments? What portfolio of policies could create synergies in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals? How could external policy, price or environmental shocks affect my country’s economic development pathway? The range of questions is as broad as a country’s economy and in general, if a policy question can be defined quantitatively, it can be examined with IEEM.