How does the model work?

The GAINS model offers a powerful tool for evaluating various scenarios and assessing the potential impact of policy interventions on greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Those impacts include the shortening of statistical life expectancy due to the human exposure to PM2.5, premature mortality related to ground-level ozone, protection of vegetation against harmful effects of acidification and terrestrial eutrophication through excess sulfur and nitrogen deposition, as well as metrics like global warming potentials. For given predefined scenarios, users can analyze the economic and environmental consequences of exogenous patterns of technology-related emission controls. Additionally, the optimization mode of the GAINS model can be operated outside the online interface to identify cost-minimal combinations of abatement measures of multiple pollutants over the various economic sectors in all regions that simultaneously achieve user-specified targets for the above mentioned impact endpoints.

While GAINS models the impacts of emission control measures on multiple pollutants, it does not include the simulation of behavioural changes of consumers that influence demand for energy, transport and agriculture. Similarly, responses of the energy and agricultural markets towards higher emission control costs, or effects that higher pollution control costs might have on the transfer of production to third countries are not taken into account into the model’s dynamics.

Further information on the way scenarios are defined in GAINS, as well as on the various assumptions underpinning the methodology of the model’s core calculations can be find under the pages below. Additional description of the optimization module can be found here.

• Scenarios
  • Components
  • Data categories
  • Commonly used scenarios
• Core calculations
  • Emissions
  • Costs
  • Impacts