Cli­mate Change Impacts on Eco­nomic Growth: Empir­i­cal Evi­dence and Pol­icy Implications

Frances C. Moore recently started as a Ciriacy-Wantrup Post-doctoral Fel­low in the Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture and Resource Eco­nom­ics at UC Berke­ley. Her work bridges envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence and eco­nom­ics in order to bet­ter under­stand cli­mate change impacts and adap­ta­tion. Her PhD work focused on agri­cul­ture and on the devel­op­ment of new econo­met­ric and exper­i­men­tal meth­ods to improve esti­mates of the rate and effec­tive­ness of pri­vate adap­ta­tion by farm­ers. She has also worked to incor­po­rate recent econo­met­ric results into Inte­grated Assess­ment Mod­els in order to improve the empir­i­cal basis of social cost of car­bon esti­mates. Ear­lier work focused on under­stand­ing the devel­op­ment of adap­ta­tion fund­ing and pol­icy within the inter­na­tional cli­mate nego­ti­a­tions. Fran received her PhD from the Emmett Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Pro­gram in Envi­ron­ment and Resources at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity in 2015. She also holds a Mas­ters in Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence from the Yale School of Forestry and Envi­ron­men­tal Stud­ies and a BA., summa cum laude, in Earth and Plan­e­tary Sci­ences from Har­vard University.

Recent empir­i­cal results sug­gest that weather shocks may have long-term impacts by affect­ing not just the level of GDP but its growth rate. This would be expected to have first-order impli­ca­tions for opti­mal mit­i­ga­tion pol­icy. Fran will be pre­sent­ing a paper, co-authored with Dela­vane Diaz, that incor­po­rates these empir­i­cal esti­mates into the DICE model. Results show that, even with opti­mistic adap­ta­tion assump­tions, these dam­ages imply the need for rapid mit­i­ga­tion that sta­bi­lizes global tem­per­a­tures below two degrees Cel­sius above pre-industrial tem­per­a­tures. A sen­si­tiv­ity analy­sis shows that the uncer­tainty in opti­mal mit­i­ga­tion pol­icy asso­ci­ated with the mag­ni­tude of growth-rate impacts is large com­pared to more widely-discussed uncer­tain­ties such as the dis­count rate or the cli­mate sen­si­tiv­ity. The end of the talk will intro­duce some new empir­i­cal results that attempt to dis­en­tan­gle the role of tem­per­a­ture and poverty in dri­ving the high sen­si­tiv­ity to warmer tem­per­a­tures observed in poor countries.

Speaker: Frances Moore, UC Berkeley