COMPASS: A social-ecological macroeconomic model for guiding pathways to equitable human wellbeing within planetary boundaries

Escalating socio-ecological crises highlight an urgent need for models that can inform national
pathways towards the “Doughnut” – the “safe and just space” where everyone’s needs are met
and no planetary boundaries are transgressed. Existing macroeconomic models and integrated
assessment models remain limited in their representation of key social and environmental
indicators that measure national performance with regards to human needs and planetary
boundaries.

This report presents a new, open-source ecological macroeconomic model that seeks to
address this gap: COMPASS - our "compass for the 21st century", as Kate Raworth describes
the Doughnut. COMPASS integrates a stock–flow consistent, dynamic input–output
macroeconomic model and a multi-cohort demographics model with two novel modules that
assess ecological sustainability and human wellbeing. The sustainability module calculates seven
types of national resource use and pollution and assesses them against planetary boundary
indicators. The wellbeing module models 13 indicators of human wellbeing and assesses them
against sufficiency thresholds.