MERGE

TLDR

Climate‑change debate is dominated by uncertainty, making cost‑benefit analysis unlikely to reach consensus, so models such as MERGE are intended as research tools that highlight key debate aspects and guide future research priorities. MERGE offers a framework for evaluating climate‑change management proposals and demonstrates its use through an initial policy‑assessment application. The flexible model decomposes costs, damages, valuation, and discounting into modular components that can be combined to explore alternative policy options.

Abstract

MERGE provides a framework for thinking about climate change management proposals. The model is designed to be sufficiently flexible to be used to explore alternative views on a wide range of contentious issues, eg costs, damages, valuation and discounting. We begin with a description of the model's individual components and show how they fit together. We then provide an initial application to illustrate how the framework can be used in the assessment of alternative policy options. Given the level of uncertainty which pervades the climate debate, it would be unrealistic to expect cost-benefit analysis to lead to consensus on a bottom line — at least any time soon. Rather, models such as MERGE should be viewed as research tools capable of providing insights into which aspects of the debate may be most important. In this way, they can help focus the discussion and identify the areas where additional research may have the highest pay-off.