The main scientific objectives of MINIMA-SUD were

- to define measurable sustainability indices covering widely disparate sustainable development concerns,
- to identify common instruments that can be used to promote sustainability in different domains,
- to model the complete path from instrument application to impact on the sustainability indicator using large models,
- to devise direct and indirect ways of measuring costs of implementation of policies,
- to quantify the risks attached to the efficacy of the application of instruments using stochastic models,
- to build a decision support tool capable of exploring policy priorities in a quest of minimising risks and maximising the economic, environmental, energy, health and physical environment benefits derived from their implementation, and finally
- to carry out policy exploration and devise systematic methods of exploring options in a multi-objective stochastic environment.

In order to quantify the implementation costs for policies (such as CO2 reduction targets) and their impact on sustainability indicators (such as energy use or emissions of greenhouse gases) an integrated assessment model (PACE-IAM) was used which combines an intertemporal multi-sector, multi-region computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of global trade and energy use with a reduced form description of the climate system.