Climate & Energy

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. 

Carbon pricing - either through a tax or emissions trading - currently covers 20% of global carbon emissions, with new policies arising each year. While such policies have long been textbook examples of cost-effective environmental policies, less is known about how they perform in practice. In addition to studying the cost-effectiveness of these policies, we also examine their equity consequences and various political economy considerations around their adoption. 

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.  

The World Health Organization calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns raise the risk of heat-related mortality, change spatial patterns of vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue, and pose an array of threats to infant and child health. We use climate science and economics to quantify how changing environmental conditions associated with climate change impact human health across the globe, with particular focus on identifying the populations that are most at risk.