The IMF-World Bank Climate Policy Assessment Tool (CPAT) is a spreadsheet-based model which helps policymakers to assess, design, and implement climate mitigation policies.
CPAT allows for the rapid estimation of effects of climate mitigation policies for over 180 countries. This includes impacts on energy demand and prices, emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs), fiscal revenues, GDP, welfare, distributional impacts on households and industries, and development co-benefits like the welfare benefits from reductions in local air pollution and road accidents.
Policies covered include carbon pricing (carbon taxes and ETSs), fossil fuel subsidy reform, energy price liberalization, electricity and fuel taxes, methane fees, VAT harmonization, energy efficiency and emission rate regulations, feebates, renewable subsidies and feed-in tariffs, green public investments, and combinations of these policies. These are evaluated against a range of metrics, allowing for assessment of tradeoffs to tailor reforms to country contexts.
In this way, CPAT helps policymakers design, assess, and implement policies for accelerating decarbonization, achieving a just transition, and supporting other government objectives such as poverty eradication and increasing energy access. CPAT also provides consistent cross-country estimates of projections of emissions, fuel use by major energy sector, mitigation effort, and efficient fuel prices.
The tool is transparent and user-friendly, requiring little prior knowledge and no external data to run. It is parameterized to be to be broadly consistent with a wide range of ex ante models as well as the ex post empirical literature.
CPAT is the result of a multi-year collaboration between IMF and World Bank staff. It evolved from an earlier IMF tool and has been significantly upgraded to include more policies, sectors, fuels, and impacts.
For details on the methodology, key inputs, assumptions, outputs, and caveats, please see the methodological Working Paper here.
