Key Messages

This project aims to understand the synergies and trade-offs involved in facing the unenviable challenge of balancing their developmental goals and climate targets.


Developing countries face the unenviable challenge of balancing their developmental goals and climate targets. This project aims to understand the synergies and trade-offs involved in doing so, in the Indian context.

The Sustainable Alternative Futures for India (SAFARI) model is a system-dynamics simulation model that can help policymakers visualise various long-term low-carbon development trajectories for India, based on technology and policy intervention scenarios of their interest. One of the key imperatives has been to capture as many inter-sectoral interlinkages as possible, in a bottom-up manner.

In SAFARI, the demands from SDG goals drive growth in the agriculture, residential, commercial, industry, and transport sectors. Sectoral growth is suitably adjusted by constraints in the availability of water, land, and materials. System dynamics allows us to capture the physical impact of these resource constraints and interdependencies among the demand sectors.