Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. It has and will continue to threaten food security, human health, water availability, and economic activity around the world. Such an unprecedented problem requires innovative new solutions, through research and policy engagement. emLab’s Climate & Energy program approaches climate change using economic theory, big data, and cutting-edge empirical techniques to both understand the consequences of climate change and to design smarter and more equitable climate policies.
Climate & Energy
Key Themes
Equity and climate justice
Climate change could exacerbate existing inequities, but the need for urgent climate action provides an opportunity to implement climate policies with built-in equity objectives that reverse existing disparities in pollution exposure, energy costs, and employment opportunities along economic, racial, gender, and other dimensions. Our projects aim to understand the distributional consequences of climate change impacts and policies, with the ultimate objective of designing equity-enhancing climate policies.
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Clean energy transitions
Inducing a major transition to clean energy is a prerequisite for any effective climate policy. But such transitions require large-scale shifts in innovation, how and where energy is produced, and where labor market opportunities reside. Effective climate policies must not only reduce carbon emissions, but must also minimize accompanying economic and social disruptions. Our work in this area focuses on the equity and labor market consequences of clean energy transitions.
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Assessing climate risk
Climate change disrupts the natural, economic, and social systems we depend on. From food security to job stability and public health, the effects of climate change are far-reaching and often unequal, hitting some countries harder than others. Our research delves into this inequality, aiming to accurately measure environmental damages crucial for shaping effective climate mitigation and adaptation policies. We combine economics, remote sensing, data science, and climate science to quantify climate change impacts across the globe, with particular focus on identifying the populations that are most at risk.
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The social cost of carbon
How are the benefits of new climate policies weighed against the costs of their implementation? Climate economists and scientists have created a value called the social cost of carbon in order to better understand the cost/benefit relationship of climate policies and regulations.
Find out how the social cost of carbon is calculated, how it should, perhaps, be calculated, and why the effort to quantify this value is necessary despite its imperfections with the help of two climate experts, Dr. Tamma Carleton of UC Santa Barbara and Dr. Bob Kopp of Rutgers University.
Publications
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Factors associated with the use of liquefied petroleum gas in Ghana vary at different stages of transition
Kar et al. 2024, Nature Energy
Estimating the role of air quality improvements in the decline of suicide rates in China
Zhang et al. 2024, Nature Sustainability
A synthesis of socioeconomic and sociocultural indicators for assessing the impacts of offshore renewable energy on fishery participants and fishing communities
Willis-Norton et al. 2024, Marine Policy
emLab Blog: Our 2 Cents
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