A central policy question is to what extent climate change should be mitigated by abating green-house gas emissions? Conversely, how much damage from climatic change should be accepted? To guide this decision, economists use integrated assessment models of climate change.
More about the project
A central policy question is to what extent climate change should be mitigated by abating greenhouse gas emissions. Conversely, how much damage from climatic change should be accepted? To guide this decision, economists use integrated assessment models (IAMs), which combine economic growth and climate change dynamics in order to calculate desirable
emission reductions and the marginal damages from CO2 emissions (the social cost of carbon).
This project will aim to improve current IAMs in several ways: Most importantly, current models are mostly deterministic. They
do not take into account scientific and economic uncertainty. The first purpose of this project is to help policy makers understand how to best respond to the uncertainties inherent in climate change. Different types of uncertainty affect the
dynamic climate-economy systems differently, and how we ought to respond to them depends on the specifics of the
uncertainty, but also on the policy makers' uncertainty preferences.
