Understanding the stakes of climate change has never been more important as 2015 promises to be a transformative year for global action. Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus crafts a game-changing profile of the economic risks of climate change in the United States, including increased coastal flooding and storm damage, altered crop yields, lost labor productivity, reshaped public-health patterns, and strained energy systems, among many other effects.
EPIC postdoctoral scholar Amir Jina co-authored the book, along with Trevor Houser (Rhodium Group), Solomon Hsiang (University of California, Berkeley), Robert Kopp (Rutgers), Kate Larsen (Rhodium Group) and others. EPIC Director Michael Greenstone, who contributed to the volume, calls it “a landmark contribution in our understanding of this complex and vital subject.”
Of the book, Jina says: “For too long we have been using old assumptions to inform climate policy. This book stands apart from others in that it takes the most transformational knowledge available today about the interactions between climate and society and combines it to generate new, and in many cases very stark, information about the impacts of unmitigated climate change.”
The book is based on a critically acclaimed independent assessment of the economic risks posed by climate change commissioned by the Risky Business Project. The Project was led by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Thomas Steyer, who wrote a foreword to the book. The book combines the latest climate models, state-of-the-art econometric research on human responses to climate, and cutting-edge private-sector risk-assessment – together forming an essential tool for helping businesses and governments prepare for the future.
Jina, Houser, Hsiang, Kopp and Greenstone, among others, are continuing this work through a larger project that is assessing the impact of climate change on communities globally. Once they have assessed the local impacts, they will then integrate them to form a robust global value of the climate damages per ton of CO2 released: the global Social Cost of Carbon.
Continue reading about the Social Cost of Carbon project…