MAPS: Models, Assessment, and Policies for Sustainability

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MAPS aims to broaden the range of policies, models, and assessments to help achieve sustainability, equity, and human well-being.The lack of evidence for sufficient absolute decoupling between economic growth and environmental pressures suggests that futuretrajectories built on economic growth may not be possible. There is an urgent need for a new paradigm that reconciles human wellbeing with environmental sustainability -- one based on a “post-growth” approach. The idea is that high-income countries should movebeyond the pursuit of GDP growth as a policy goal, and instead pursue policies that improve human well-being while reducing resourceuse. Despite increasing interest in this idea, the main integrated assessment models (IAMs) used in climate mitigation modelling do notconsider post-growth policies or scenarios. MAPS has the ambition to expand the range of policy options available to policymakers andincorporate post-growth scenarios into the major scientific assessments of the IPCC and IPBES. Our goal is to provide new approachesto help steer Europe and the world back within planetary boundaries without compromising on valuable social welfare goals. To this end,MAPS will use participatory processes to develop new policy packages and scenarios, and then assess these policies using a state-of-theart simulation model. In particular, it will estimate the resource use requirements of a good life, design social welfare systems that aregrowth-resilient, incorporate a broader range of environmental and social indicators into assessment models, and explore how alternativepolicies could be implemented in practice. MAPS will provide knowledge about policies that reduce resource use to be within planetaryboundaries while maintaining or improving social outcomes. In so doing, it will improve decision-making capacity by broadening therange of policy options, modelling frameworks, and assessments for sustainability.