An output could be a piece of forest that is protected from logging. An outcome is some amount of CO2 converted into O2 that wouldn’t otherwise. But also a different piece of forest getting logged that wouldn’t otherwise. And a bunch of r-strategist animals dying of parasites, starvation, and predation who would otherwise not have been born. Some impact on the workers who now have to travel further to log trees. And much more.
The attempt to trade off all of these effects (perhaps using an open source repository of composeable probabilistic models like Squiggle) is what results in an impact estimate.
I use “impact” to mean “net impact,” basically.
An output could be a piece of forest that is protected from logging. An outcome is some amount of CO2 converted into O2 that wouldn’t otherwise. But also a different piece of forest getting logged that wouldn’t otherwise. And a bunch of r-strategist animals dying of parasites, starvation, and predation who would otherwise not have been born. Some impact on the workers who now have to travel further to log trees. And much more.
The attempt to trade off all of these effects (perhaps using an open source repository of composeable probabilistic models like Squiggle) is what results in an impact estimate.