Elizabeth A. Stanton

Climate Risks and Carbon Prices: Revising the Social Cost of Carbon

The social cost of carbon - or marginal damage caused by an additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions - has been estimated by a U.S. government working group at

Inside the integrated assessment models: Four issues in climate economics

21 in 2010. That calculation, however, omits many of the biggest risks associated with climate change, and downplays the impact of our current emissions on future generations. Our reanalysis explores the effects of uncertainty about climate sensitivity, the shape of the damage function, and the discount rate. We show that the social cost of carbon is uncertain across a broad range, and could be much higher than

Land Reform and Sustainable Development

21. In our worst case, it could be almost

Fat tails, exponents, extreme uncertainty: Simulating catastrophe in DICE

900 in 2010, rising to

Negishi welfare weights in integrated assessment models: the mathematics of global inequality

1,500 in 2050. The most ambitious scenarios for eliminating carbon dioxide emissions as rapidly as technologically feasible (reaching zero or negative net global emissions by the end of this century) require spending up to

Did the Stern Review underestimate US and global climate damages

150 to

The Caribbean and climate change: the costs of inaction.

500 per ton of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Using a reasonable set of alternative assumptions, therefore, the damages from a ton of carbon dioxide emissions in 2050 could exceed the cost of reducing emissions at the maximum technically feasible rate. Once this is the case, the exact value of the social cost of carbon loses importance: the clear policy prescription is to reduce emissions a rapidly as possible, and cost-effectiveness analysis offers better insights for climate policy than cost-benefit analysis.

Florida and Climate Change: The Costs of Inaction

Good climate policy requires the best possible understanding of how climatic change will impact on human lives and livelihoods in both industrialized and developing counties. Our review of recent contributions to the climate-economics literature assesses 30 existing integrated assessment models in four key areas: the connection between model structure and the type of results produced; uncertainty in climate outcomes and projection of future damages; equity across time and space; and abatement costs and the endogeneity of technological change. Differences in treatment of these issues are substantial and directly affect model results and their implied policy prescriptions. Much can be learned about climate economics and modelling technique from the best practices in these areas; there is unfortunately no existing model that incorporates the best practices on all or most of the questions we examine.

CRED: A New Model of Climate and Development

Land reform, equitable distribution, economic development, environmental quality, land reform strategies, Brazil, Landless Workers’ Movement, East Asia, rural poverty, land productivity, sustainable agriculture, comparative advantage, small farms.