Selected Publications

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a commonly employed metric of the expected economic damages expected from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Although useful in an optimal policy context, a world-level approach obscures the heterogeneous geography of climate damage and vast differences in country-level contributions to the global SCC, as well as climate and socio-economic uncertainties, which are larger at the regional level. Here we estimate country-level contributions to the SCC using recent climate model projections, empirical climate-driven economic damage estimations and socio-economic projections. Central specifications show high global SCC values (median, $417 per tonne of CO2 (tCO2); 66% confidence intervals, US$177–805 per tCO2) and a country-level SCC that is unequally distributed. However, the relative ranking of countries is robust to different specifications: countries that incur large fractions of the global cost consistently include India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
In Nat. Clim. Change, 2018
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Strategies for dealing with climate change must incorporate and quantify all the relevant uncertainties, and be designed to manage the resulting risks. Here we employ the best available knowledge so far, summarized by the three working groups of the IPCC AR5, to quantify the uncertainty of mitigation costs, climate change dynamics, and economic damage for alternative carbon budgets. We rank climate policies according to different decision-making criteria concerning uncertainty, risk aversion and intertemporal preferences. Our findings show that preferences over uncertainties are as important as the choice of the widely discussed time discount factor. Climate policies consistent with limiting warming to 2°C above preindustrial levels are compatible with a subset of decision-making criteria and some model parametrizations, but not with the commonly adopted expected utility framework.
In Nat. Clim. Change, 2015
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Recent Publications

More Publications

. NeatWork, a tool for the design of gravity-driven water distribution systems for poor rural communities. In Interfaces, 2019.

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. Implications of various effort-sharing approaches for national carbon budgets and emission pathways. In Clim. Change, 2019.

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. Looking under the hood: A comparison of techno-economic assumptions across national and global integrated assessment models. In Energy, 2018.

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. Future Global Air Quality Indices under Different Socioeconomic and Climate Assumptions. In Sustainability, 2018.

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. Country-level Social Cost of Carbon. In Nat. Clim. Change, 2018.

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. Residual fossil CO2 emissions in 1.5–2°C pathways. In Nat. Clim. Change, 2018.

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. Energy investment needs for fulfilling the Paris Agreement and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. In Nat. Energy, 2018.

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. Enhancing global climate policy ambition towards a 1.5°C stabilization: a short-term multi-model assessment. In Environ. Res. Lett., 2018.

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. Scenarios towards limiting global mean temperature increase below 1.5°C. In Nat. Clim. Change, 2018.

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. Water demand for electricity in deep decarbonisation scenarios: a multi-model assessment. In Clim. Change, 2018.

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