Abt Associates supported the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Center for Environmental Economics in reviewing and critiquing the integrated assessment models used by researchers to predict the social and economic costs of climate change.

The project focused on two areas of climate change impact: Energy demand for space heating in residential and industrial buildings, and the economic costs of extreme weather.

For each topic, we:

• Reviewed research on the historical relationship between weather and economic endpoints;
• Characterized the mechanisms and potential pathways via which climate change could affect those endpoints; and
• Described the ways that integrated assessment models could be improved by existing research.

The final project results are documented in NCEE working papers:

• Climate Change and Space Heating Energy Demand: A Review of the Literature
• Modeling the Impact of Climate Change on Extreme Weather Losses