Publication: Climate Damage in the United States /  by Solomon Hsiang

James Rising, Solomon Hsiang, and former lab member Amir Jina, along with other teammates from the Climate Impact Lab, have a new paper out in Science calculating economic damages from climate change in the United States.  

The analysis is the first to construct a "damage function" using micro-level econometric results for a large number of sectors, linked to the full suite of climate models used in CMIP5.  Because the analysis has high spatial resolution, it is able to resolve how impacts of unmitigated climate damages across the country will vary, demonstrating that it will substantially increase economic inequality.

See the paper and an interactive visualization of results.

Hsiang Science USA

Update: The team at the Associated Press did a really nice interactive visualization of the results:

Carleton named 30 under 30 by Pacific Standard /  by Solomon Hsiang

We're super proud that Tamma Carleton, one of our doctoral fellows, was named one of the top 30 Thinkers Under 30 in Policy and Social Justice by the Pacific Standard! You can read Carleton's profile here. 

“As the human environmental footprint takes on a global scale, I feel that each day I have two choices. One is to shrink back from this problem and decide that as an individual I cannot influence its evolution. The other is to do everything I can to try to inform solutions. Most days, I choose the latter.”
— Tamma Carleton, 29

Climate Impact Lab Interactive Maps Launch + NYT Feature /  by Solomon Hsiang

Two big things happened today. First, our team at the Climate Impact Lab launched an interactive data visualization page where many of our results will be featured as we produce them. You can zoom to the future and see probabilistic outcomes at unprecedented resolution (>24,000 individual regions!).

Second, the New York Times featured the the Impact Lab's work and built their own visualization to illustrate the changing frequency of extremely hot days expected in the future.

Obama cites GPL climate economics research /  by Solomon Hsiang

In his recent Science article The Irreversible Momentum of Clean Energy,  President Obama jumped into the "growth vs. levels" debate among empirical economists studying the effects of climate change, writing 

[E]vidence is mounting that any economic strategy that ignores carbon pollution will impose tremendous costs to the global economy and will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth over the long term. Estimates of the economic damages from warming of 4°C over preindustrial levels range from 1% to 5% of global GDP each year by 2100 ... In addition, these estimates factor in economic damages but do not address the critical question of whether the underlying rate of economic growth (rather than just the level of GDP) is affected by climate change, so these studies could substantially understate the potential damage of climate change on the global macroeconomy (8, 9).

and citing the recent GPL paper on the global effects of temperature on growth. 

Talk about a president who gets into the nuts and bolts...

Coolest author affiliation... ever

Paper: Understanding farmer crop choice in response to climate change /  by Solomon Hsiang

James Rising has a new working paper Weather-driven adaptation in perennial crop systems:An integrated study of Brazilian coffee yields, demonstrating how farmers in Brazil cope with changing environmental conditions by altering the portfolio of coffee crops they maintain. The analysis develops a novel structural Bayesian modeling approach that embeds reduced form modeling estimates, allowing James to solve (for the first time) the well-known "problem with perennials", i.e. the fact that analysts and policy-makes cannot generally observe the number of long-live plants (perennials) that farmers maintain on a farm. The analysis is important because it demonstrates how farmers cope with a changing climate by changing their investment decisions, sometimes amplifying the economic impact of changes in climate. 

James Rising Coffee

Paper: Non-linear network behavior of protesters during escalating social movements /  by Solomon Hsiang

Felipe Gonzalez has a new working paper Collective Action in Networks: Evidence from the Chilean Student Movement, demonstrating how millions of students across schools in Chile influence one another to participate in a growing social movement.  Felipe demonstrates how the number of individuals in each student's social network, in addition to each student's physical neighborhood, increases the likelihood that specific students will participate in the 2011 student movement. He finds strong evidence of a "tipping point" where if 40% of a student's class is participating, then the entire class "tips" and begins attending the protest.  This is important because it is the first empirical evidence testing classical models of social network dynamics in revolutionary environments.

Locations of over 50,000 student protesters in Santiago, Chile during the 2011 student movement

Locations of over 50,000 student protesters in Santiago, Chile during the 2011 student movement

Discussing the future of energy at MIT /  by GlobalPolicyLab Member

Sol spoke at MIT's EmTech conference alongside MIT's Donald Sadoway about the future of energy.

Sol speaks at MIT about the impact of climate change

Donald Sadoway speaks at MIT about preventing climate change through engineering innovation. 

Op-Ed in the Guardian: Would a legal ivory trade save elephants? /  by GlobalPolicyLab Member

Solomon Hsiang and Nitin Sekar published an op-ed in the Guardian, in answer to the question: "Would a legal ivory trade save elephants or speed up the massacre?"

The op-ed discusses the recent research findings from the Lab that legal ivory sales in 2008 increased poaching, rather than decreased poaching as the policy intended.

These findings were cited in editorials by the New York Times and the Guardian calling for stronger action and regulation (or total bans) of legal ivory trade.

Negotiations for creating a permanent legal global ivory market were halted at the recent meeting of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, in part due to these research findings.

Nairobi-Ivory-Burn-by-Mwangi-Kirubi-8.jpg

Publication: Social and economic impacts of climate /  by Solomon Hsiang

Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang published an article in Science discussing and synthesizing the methods and results used to understand the impact of climate from the last decade. We demonstrate how findings across the literature and sectors are linked, identify commonalities across numerous studies, and compute how much (i) various aspects of the current climate contribute to to historical social outcomes, (ii) how much climate change to date has affected outcomes, and (iii) quantitative projections of the future. We identify that understanding "adaptation gaps" is the most important area for future research.

Documentary movie on climate as a cause of conflict /  by GlobalPolicyLab Member

Want to be on the silver screen? Get a PhD. Sol was interviewed for a new documentary (which he hasn't seen yet). 

What the filmmakers say about it

‘The Hurt Locker’ meets ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, THE AGE OF CONSEQUENCES investigates the impacts of climate change on increased resource scarcity, migration, and conflict through the lens of US national security and global stability.
Through unflinching case-study analysis, distinguished admirals, generals and military veterans take us beyond the headlines of the conflict in Syria, the social unrest of the Arab Spring, the rise of radicalized groups like ISIS, and the European refugee crisis – and lay bare how climate change stressors interact with societal tensions, sparking conflict.
Whether a long-term vulnerability or sudden shock, the film unpacks how water and food shortages, drought, extreme weather, and sea-level rise function as ‘accelerants of instability’ and ‘catalysts for conflict’ in volatile regions of the world.
 
 

Berkeley Opportunity Lab web launch /  by Solomon Hsiang

We launched the Opportunity Lab website. The Opportunity Lab is a new group of economists on campus that leverage data to uncover solutions to poverty and inequality issues.  The Lab focuses on six core research areas: Climate and Environment, Crime and Criminal Justice, Education and Child Development, Health, Social Safety Nets and Employment, Taxation and Inequality. Sol and collaborator Reed Walker are co-directing the Climate and Environment program of the Lab. Stay tuned!