About FrEDI
EPA developed FrEDI to fill an important gap in assessing U.S. climate change impacts by incorporating a broad range of impact studies into a common, open-source framework. The resulting FrEDI framework is a peer-reviewed, open-source, reduced complexity model that rapidly projects the impacts of climate change within the United States, under any custom temperature or policy pathway.
FrEDI currently draws on underlying datasets, sectoral impact models, and methods from over 30 existing peer-reviewed studies, including from the Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA) project, to estimate the relationship between future degrees of warming and impacts across more than 20 category sectors, 7 regions, and populations within U.S. borders. When supplied with a user-defined temperature trajectory, FrEDI then applies these temperature-impact relationships to rapidly project annual climate change impacts and damages through the end of the 21st century. As the scientific literature advances, FrEDI is also updated to capture additional impacts and better understand how climate change may be experienced within the U.S.
The FrEDI Technical Documentation, describing the framework and underlying studies, was subject to a public and independent external peer review, consistent with guidelines described in EPA’s Peer Review Handbook.