Global High-Resolution Models Integrating the Economy, Climate, and Weather
POSITION FILLED
FACULTY SUPERVISOR:
PROJECT AND POSITION DESCRIPTION:
The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to build a global computational model of the interactions between the economy, climate, and weather at a high degree of geographic resolution. Capturing such interactions is critical for understanding how the economic impacts of climate change vary across space and time and for devising government policies that can ameliorate these impacts. This work will merge the efforts of economists and climate scientists into a unified whole. Specifically, the computational model will integrate a spatial model of the economic impacts of climate change with the Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM2), which makes predictions about temperature, precipitation, wind, and extreme weather events at a high degree of geographic resolution as the climate changes.
The primary task of the project is to develop a rich model of how economies respond to climate change and then to integrate, or "couple", it with the Norwegian Earth System Model. The coupled model then permits a seamless and detailed analysis of the interactions between the economy, climate, and weather across the globe. The economic model also incorporates policy instruments, such as taxes on emissions of greenhouse gases, that governments can use to mitigate climate change. This model goes well beyond existing economy-climate models by incorporating realistic weather patterns at a high degree of geographic resolution. Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, are key drivers of economic damages stemming from climate change, but for technical reasons they are typically omitted from existing climate-economy models. The integrated economy-climate model to be constructed in this project instead embeds such events in a realistic way.
This project will provide a unified quantitative platform for assessing the economic impacts of climate change and of policies designed to ameliorate them. Because this platform contains a rich spatial dimension, it can address questions not only of average economic welfare across countries or the globe itself, but also of the distribution of economic welfare across space. Which regions of a country are most and least affected by climate change? Does climate change increase or decrease economic inequality across countries over time? To what extent can the least-affected regions and countries compensate the most-affected? Who gains and who loses from economic policies aimed at limiting the extent of climate change?
REQUISITE SKILLS AND QUALIFICATIONS:
The Pre-Doctoral Fellow would assist in all aspects of building the high-resolution economy-climate model. Specific tasks include: organizing data to be used in the calibration of the model; writing computer code to solve and simulate the model; and conducting empirical analyses of economic damages caused by climate change and extreme weather events.
The ideal candidate would have training in economics, dynamic economic modelling, numerical analysis, and statistics and econometrics, and would be well-versed in the use of Excel, Stata or R, and a high-level programming language such as Julia (preferably) or Fortran.