The last decade saw an explosion in the use of simulation models to provide policy advice from policies to mitigate climate change, address the Covid-19 pandemic to project population movements. Yet there is a growing public concern that policymakers are being left behind when it comes to not only understanding the model advice but questioning the basic assumptions of how a model works to have honest policy conversations.

The guidance aims to fill this gap by identifying practical questions that need to be asked around the model data, the underlying assumptions, model quality and reliability of the results to help policymakers and citizens better discern good from bad practices of model use.