November 19, 2020: IRES Faculty Seminar with Felix Pretis


IRES Seminar Series

Time: 12:30pm to 1:30pm (every Thursday)

Via Zoom

This seminar will not be recorded.

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An empirical climate damage function accounting for climate extremes and adaptation

Using machine learning and econometric model selection, we construct an empirically-derived climate damage function allowing for the potential impact of climate extremes and accounting for possible adaptation pathways. The damage function can be disaggregated to a country level as a function of global mean surface temperature and is independent of any specific emission scenario. Combined with a novel baseline of long-run forecasts of future economic development, our empirical damage function projects median global GDP per capita level impacts ranging from an 8% reduction for warming around 1.5°C up to a 40% reduction for warming beyond 5.5°C degrees relative to forecasts without climate change. We show evidence of historical climate adaptation at a macro-economic level, where climate impacts are unstable over time and attenuated by higher incomes. More broadly, our results highlight concerns about the stability of future projected impacts in the presence of adaptation.​

Felix Pretis

Professor, Department of Economics, University of Victoria

Bio:

Felix Pretis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Victoria, and co-director of the Climate Econometrics research project at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining UVic, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford where he also completed his PhD in Economics, and a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley. His research concentrates on econometric methods applied to climate change and his work on the economic impacts of climate change featured in the IPCC special report on 1.5C.