Cost-Benefit Reports

This guide describes the Cost-Benefit Reports feature within the LEAP software, explaining how it provides a comparative overview of incremental cumulative costs and benefits across different scenarios relative to a reference baseline.

• The cost-benefit summary report provides a tabular and chart-based comparison of incremental cumulative costs and benefits for scenarios against a reference baseline, typically a policy-neutral counterfactual. Costs are discounted to a base year using a user-specified discount rate, and the monetary unit can be customized.
• The report calculates costs and benefits across Demand sectors, Transformation modules, and the production, import, and export of fuels and resources within the study Area. It provides total system costs, an overall benefit/cost ratio, and can optionally include environmental externality costs if enabled in the Settings screen.
• Costs are represented as positive values and benefits as negative values relative to the baseline. Costs are only recorded if there are both physical differences between scenarios and corresponding unit costs entered in the Demand, Transformation, and Resource data entry tables.
• The report tracks total cumulative greenhouse gas emissions avoided in tonnes of CO2 equivalent, using IPCC 100-year integration global warming potential factors by default. It also calculates the overall cost of saving CO2 emissions, both with and without the co-benefits of avoiding non-greenhouse gas pollutants.
• The cost-benefit report requires at least two scenarios to be created before it can be viewed. The report's rows cannot be altered, and the report itself cannot be deleted.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (n.d.). Cost-Benefit Reports. https://leap.sei.org/help24/Views/Cost_Summary_Report.htm

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Cost-Benefit Reports. n.d. https://leap.sei.org/help24/Views/Cost_Summary_Report.htm.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Cost-Benefit Reports |url=https://leap.sei.org/help24/Views/Cost_Summary_Report.htm |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitutendcostbenefit, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Cost-Benefit Reports}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, url = {https://leap.sei.org/help24/Views/Cost_Summary_Report.htm}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }