GAINS Model

Many traditional air pollutants and greenhouse gases have common sources. Their emissions interact in the atmosphere, and—jointly and individually—cause a variety of harmful environmental effects at the local, regional, and global scales.

The GAINS model explores cost-effective emission control strategies that simultaneously tackle local air quality and greenhouse gases so as to maximize benefits at all scales.

This GAINS tool offers three ways to reveal policy interventions with multiple benefits:

• Simulation of the costs, health and ecosystems benefits of user-defined packages of emission control measures;
• Cost-effectiveness analysis to identify least-cost packages of measures that achieve user-defined policy targets; and
• Cost-benefit assessments that maximize (monetized) net benefits of policy interventions.