IMED model

In view of the aforementioned pressing background and urgent demand for policy assessment, the Green and Low Carbon Research Group (Homepage: http://scholar.pku.edu.cn/hanchengdai) of College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Peking University is devoted to developing integrated assessment model of energy-environment-economy system and contributing to the academic research and policy making of green and low-carbon sustainable development. The model is called IMED, or Integrated Model of Energy, Environment and Economy for Sustainable Development. IMED is a system of databases and models dealing with the complex systems of energy, environment and economy with the purpose of systematically and quantitatively analyzing economic, energy, environmental and climate policies at the city, provincial, national and global scales to provide relevant scientific support for decision making.

In recent years, IMED has been applied systematically to analyze air pollution reduction (Dong et al., 2015), human health (Xie et al., 2016; Xie et al., 2017), resource efficiency (Wang et al., 2018), energy and climate mitigation policies (Dai et al., 2016; Dai et al., 2017,; Dai et al., 2016) of China at the national and provincial levels.

Key components of the IMED model

IMED aims to integrate different kinds of models to address various research objectives, including:

1. To simulate development pathways of energy, environment and economic systems;
2. To explore the mechanisms of driving forces of economic development;
3. To investigate the externality of different economic development patterns on resource, energy consumption and environment;
4. To quantify the cost and benefit of green and low-carbon transition.

The core concern of IMED model is to focus on the socioeconomic aspects and energy systems, including the following key modules:

• IMED|Data: A data base of energy, environment and economy related to global and national Input-output table, energy balance table, material and resource input output table, industry statistics, environmental pollutant emissions, human health data etc.
• IMED|MIN: Statistical analysis of IMED|DATA using statistical techniques or machine learning techniques to find out laws of how economic development pattern, trajectories of key industry. Ultimately, it could help to obtain a more plausible projection of the future socioeconomic driving forces.
• IMED|CGE: Computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the global economy and China’s provincial and national economy.
• MED|HIO: Hybrid Input-Output model that combines the top-down type input-output analysis and bottom-up type of hundreds of discrete technology choices. The purpose is to account the energy consumption and environmental pollutant emissions under various trajectories of economic development.
• IMED|HEL: IMED|HEL model quantifies the health and economic impacts caused by ambient air pollution. To address the indoor air pollution, we extended the IMED/Health model by introducing an indoor air pollution health impact module.

In addition, by soft-link with other existing models such as air quality model, water resource model, water quality model, crop model, land-use model, climate model etc., IMED model attempts to provide solutions to related policy making from the perspectives of interdisciplinary angle of societal-economic-industrial-energy-environment-climate chains.