IMPACTS research is designed to help understand the impact of climate fluctuations on societal outcomes-of-interest as a contribution to evidence-based policy and practice in climate risk management for development. IMPACTS tries to answer the basic question of "does climate (and derived environmental factors) matter" to the outcome of interest to decision makers, whether the outcome is incidence of meningococcal meningitis in Niger, malaria in Botswana, global disaster-related losses, crop yields in Gujurat or tax receipts in Indonesia etc.--and if it does, how much it matters and to whom.
To do this, it is essential to understand if there is a causal relationship between climatic/environmental variability and increases or decreases in a specific outcome and whether or not an individual outcome can be attributed to a climatic/environmental event. The existence of a causal relationship generally suggests that--all other things being equal--if the cause occurs the effect will as well (or at least the probability of the effect occurring will increase) and that by quantifying this relationship decision makers may be able to use prior information either to mitigate harmful effects or gain on positive ones.
Although this might sound simple, attributing variations in socio-economic outcomes to climatic/environmental variability is complicated by a wide range of factors including: the stochastic nature of the relationship, the interactions of many other factors that either constrain or foster the particular outcomes of interest, potential indirect impacts of interventions, and time lags between implementation and measurable impacts, for example. A major constraint is the difficulty we have in finding indicators that are able to accurately measure the outcome of interest, and as a consequence proxies are often widely used. As was observed by Albert Einstein, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
