Climate change is a social justice as well as an environmental issue. The magnitude and pattern of changes in weather and climate variables are creating differential exposures, vulnerabilities, and health risks that increase stress on health systems while exacerbating existing and creating new health inequities. Examples from national and local health adaptation projects highlight that developi...

In this paper we develop an economic growth model that includes anthropogenic climate change. We include a publicly funded research sector that creates new technologies and simultaneously expands the productivities of existing technologies. The environment is affected by R&D activities both negatively, through the increase of output from productivity growth, as well as positively as new technol...

This paper uses annual variation in climate to examine the impact of temperature and precipitation on national economies. We find three primary results. First, higher temperatures substantially reduce economic growth in poor countries. Second, higher temperatures appear to reduce growth rates, not just the level of output. Third, higher temperatures have wide-ranging effects, reducing agricultu...

Among the challenges posed by human-caused climate change are issues of justice and democracy, in how the environmental problem is expected to affect human social and economic systems and in the response taken by states and the international community to mitigate the problem. While unmitigated climate change unjustly harms the most vulnerable and widens existing unjust inequalities, programs to...

Back in the early 1970s, Partha Dasgupta realized that the economic models of the time were neglecting an entire class of capital assets: natural resources. Over the course of his career, Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has worked to put “natural capital” on an equal footing with other capital assets, exploring h...

We apply a probabilistic approach to the evaluation of climate change impacts in the Zambeze River Valley. The economic modeling relies on an economywide modeling approach. Taking a distribution of shocks as inputs, we create hybrid frequency distributions of the potential economic impacts of climate change for Mozambique. The approach identifies an explicit range of potential outcomes and asso...

Findings in behavioral science, including psychology, have influenced policies and reforms in many nations. Choice architecture can affect outcomes even if material incentives are not involved. In some contexts, default rules, simplification, and social norms have had even larger effects than significant economic incentives. Psychological research is helping to inform initiatives in savings, fi...

The Institute of Hydrophysics of GKSS Research Center is developing the tools and expertise required for both past reconstructions and future predictions of substance fluxes on a regional scale and over a period of several decades, and to evaluate their impacts to society. The goal is to build our capacity to compare between scenarios, be it scenarios of substance-emission regulations, economic...

The rapid expansion of oil sands production in northern Alberta is under scrutiny worldwide due to concerns about its environmental, social, and economic impacts. Environmental concerns include climate change impacts from CO2 emissionsalongwithmore local environmental impacts such as dead birds, cancer clusters, and destruction of boreal forests.Within Canada, oil sands have become an important...

As soon as practical, Earth’s low-cost, abundant, environmentally attractive fusion energy resources should be applied to the urgent global challenges of climate change, energy supply, economic growth, and the developing world. A National Ignition Campaign is under way at the recently completed National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to ignite high-gain...