DYNamic feedbacks of climate impacts on current Adaptation and Mitigation Investment Choice – DYNAMIC

DYNAMIC is a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowships for Career Development (IOF). The project proposes a novel framework to modeling the economic consequences of climate change impacts and the induced policy responses, in terms of both mitigation and adaptation strategies at regional scale.

To accomplish this task, the project will deliver an improved methodology compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The improved methodology will articulate in a transparent and consistent way the steps required to connect biophysical impacts, general equilibrium losses, and mitigation and adaptation strategies for globe. This is a challenging task because of the need of combing global scenarios for climate variables, such temperature and precipitation, with regional/sectoral impact response functions and adaptation strategies.

DYNAMIC is intrinsically interdisciplinary, requiring a clear understanding of the scientific basis for estimating climate impacts and the skill to combine rigorous empirical analysis with judgment and assumptions in order to cope with incomplete or incommensurate data. The work will be articulated in three main activities: (1) Selection of climate change impacts and estimation of impact response functions (2) Database on climate change impact shocks, adaptation costs and benefits, and implementation protocols for selected impacts (3) Model development and numerical exercises.

The expected impact of this research is potentially high because it will develop a roadmap that will serve the future research on the economics of climate change impacts and adaptation. This projects will initiate a process ultimately aimed at characterizing the global damage-adaptation-mitigation nexus, but with a sectoral resolution. The data matrix and implementation protocols will provide a roadmap for translating empirical estimates of sectoral/regional impacts into shocks or reduced-form damage functions for CGE models.

The first project year will be carried out at the Boston University, under the supervision of Prof. Ian Sue Wing. The second and last project year will be carried out at FEEM, under the supervision of Dr. Francesco Bosello.