November 14, 2024: IRES Faculty Seminar with Dr. Jonathan Proctor

Estimating local socioeconomic vulnerability to climate shocks using satellite imagery

Click here to register for Zoom link. Zoom will be terminated if we encounter tech problems 5 to 10 mins into the seminar. This seminar will not be recorded.


Talk summary:

Understanding how climate hazards like extreme heat and flooding influence human wellbeing is critical for preparing societies for climate change. Yet empirical estimates of how vulnerability to climate hazards differs across space is limited by both a lack of knowledge about and data on determinants of climate adaptation. Here, we leverage the rich and diverse information within satellite imagery to predict local climate vulnerability in the U.S. and globally. Including imagery information into empirical models of how temperature and moisture influence agricultural productivity, how temperature influences human mortality and how flood depth damages buildings, improves model predictions of historic damages from climate hazards and reveals substantial local differences in climate vulnerability and resilience.

Dr. Jonathan Proctor, Assistant Professor, UBC Food and Resource Economics

Bio:

Jonathan Proctor is an environmental economist with a background in agronomy, climate science, remote sensing, and machine learning. He is currently an assistant professor in Food and Resource Economics at the University of British Columbia. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow jointly at the Harvard Data Science Initiative and the Center for the Environment. He earned his PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley in 2019.