SEI Webinar: New Integrated Climate and Development Planning Tools

Recording

Event Date

October 24 and October 26, 2023.

Overview

The webinar presents and discusses a series of new SEI tools designed to support integrated planning for climate change mitigation and sustainable development.  

Integrated planning is essential to achieving the urgent progress needed on climate and sustainable development, yet easily accessible planning tools allowing the comparison of different policy options quantitatively are missing. Recognizing the interconnectedness of climate change and sustainable development, teams at SEI have been hard at work developing tools that can support long-term integrated climate and development planning using the Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP). The new tools can assess economic feedback effects, air quality impacts and land use change implications of climate mitigation policies, and be used by planners and policy makers to identify policies that maximize synergies between climate mitigation, climate adaption and development. 

Key Messages

1. Stakeholders around the world have a vivid interest in integrated climate and development planning tools. 936 people registered for the webinar and over 350 people attended. 128 countries were represented including planners, LEAP users, policy makers, NGOs and consulting companies.
2. Open source tools that can support integrated climate and development planning are sorely missing. Gathering information and analysis for integrated planning requires accessible, quantitative tools that can compare policy options, and analyse impacts on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate mitigation. Of eight currently existing tools, none meet these requirements.
3. Four new SEI tools fill this gap.They allow estimating climate and development implications on the macroeconomy, land use and land use change, agriculture and health: AMES, FOLU, AgHealth and the SEI Africa Assessment Model (freely available one early 2024). The tools are intended to support deep decarbonization and development planning by national planners and other stakeholders, and work as extensions to the Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP). Analyses employing these tools can prioritize decisions that increase synergies and reduce negative trade-offs between sustainable development and climate change mitigation so that policy makers can concentrate activities in areas that offer the greatest returns.
4. The tools were specifically designed to enable LEAP-users and policy planners to assess impacts of climate mitigation policies on other development objectives. Two of the tools, AMES and the AgHealth tool are already freely available from github. The LEAP-based SEI Africa Assessment model will become available together with a new LEAP version in early 2024.
5. During the webinar, tool developers and SEI experts Eric Kemp-Benedict, Chris Malley and Charlie Heaps answered questions around these new tools. They highlighted the need for integrated assessments to maximise policy outcomes, and illustrated positive stakeholder responses to the tools in case studies in Morocco and Zimbabwe, where AMES and the FOLU tools have been applied successfully to quantify positive impacts on the economy, land use, and biodiversity.

Speakers

• Charlotte Wagner, SEI Scientist 
• Eric Kemp-Benedict, Equitable Transitions Program Director and LEAP-Macro developer 
• Chris Malley, Senior Scientist and FOLU and AgHealth developer 
• Charlie Heaps, Energy Modeling Program Director and LEAP developer