The Geography of Climate Change: Developing Frameworks to Assess the Economic Impact of Climate Change Across Time and Space

Climate change is a global phenomenon with heterogeneous local economic consequences. Understanding its economic impact across time and space, the forms of adaptation it generates, and the policies to address its causes and consequences require the development of dynamic global integrated assessment models that incorporate the geography of the world at a high spatial resolution. This project aims to develop economic frameworks that incorporate a rich set of realistic interactions between locations and over time (including migration, trade, investments, technology transfers, and energy production and transmission systems), a rich set of environmental implications of carbon emissions and the resulting temperature changes (including heat waves, storms, sea level rise, and deforestation), and the associated risk and uncertainty. Developing accurate frameworks that properly incorporate the interactions between all these components is essential to evaluating and designing effective policies and should become an essential assessment tool for climate-related risks for the corporate, financial, and government sectors.

“Understanding the economic impact of climate change requires economic frameworks that incorporate a rich set of realistic interactions between locations and over time. With the support of UChicago’s Climate and Sustainable Growth Institute, we aim to develop accurate frameworks that incorporate these interactions and use them to evaluate and design effective policies to combat the sources and consequences of climate change.”

Esteban Rossi Hansberg, Department of Economics