Trade and Environment Assessment Model (TEAM)

Abt Associates developed the Trade and Environmental Assessment Model (TEAM) as a screening-level tool to support EPA assessments of environmental flows associated with trade agreements and other macro and/or sector-level economic events, including changing patterns of domestic production independent of trade agreements.

The website provides some background on TEAM and a download of the model. For more information about TEAM, please contact Isabelle Morin.

What is TEAM?

The objective of the TEAM framework is to provide a comprehensive and consistent framework for analyzing environmental effects in a range of pollutant or resource use categories (e.g., Criteria and Hazardous Air Pollutant emissions, direct and indirect water pollutant discharges, energy use, emissions of greenhouse gases). The model relates economic activity specified by geographical unit (e.g., state) and North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) sector to emissions/resource use attributed to these same activities.

TEAM functions as an input-output framework that treats physical units of environmental release essentially as factor inputs in the production process. Using economic sector and location-specific emission and resource use factors, TEAM estimates the change in discharge of pollutants/use of resources by state for sectors affected by trade agreements or other sector-level economic events. In addition to analyzing emissions effects in directly affected sectors, the model includes capability for estimating the economy-wide linked sector effects, based on use of an input-output analysis pre-processor. Discharge effects by state are reported in relation to baseline emissions levels to identify potentially significant environmental impacts.

The current version of TEAM uses 2002 as its baseline year.