arXiv subjects

Lisa Rennels

Publications and source records attributed to Lisa Rennels.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Robustness to Model Uncertainties Drives More Rapid CO2 Emissions Reductions

Evaluating the economic impacts of climate policies is important for designing a response to climate change. One typical approach to assessing mitigation policy options uses integrated climate-economy models to analyze tradeoffs between the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the benefits of reducing climate damages. However, the uncertainty characterizing these models poses significant challenges for policymakers. We address this difficulty using a robust decision-making framework to evaluate mitigation policy. We show that a shift from a decision framework that maximizes expected outcomes to one that is averse to regret suggests more aggressive emissions reductions. Uncertainties about socioeconomic trajectories and the magnitude and functional form of climate damages create the asymmetric consequences of weak mitigation policy that encourage aggressive emissions reductions and precaution in the face of uncertainty.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Economic Impacts of Climate Change in the United States: Integrating and Harmonizing Evidence from Recent Studies

This paper synthesizes evidence on climate change impacts specific to U.S. populations. We develop an apples-to-apples comparison of econometric studies that empirically estimate the relationship between climate change and gross domestic product (GDP). We demonstrate that with harmonized probabilistic socioeconomic and climate inputs these papers project a narrower and lower range of 2100 GDP losses than what is reported across the published studies, yet the implied U.S.-specific social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) is still greater than the market-based damage estimates in current enumerative models. We then integrate evidence on nonmarket damages with the GDP impacts and recover a jointly-estimated SC-GHG. Our findings highlight the need for more research on both market and nonmarket climate impacts, including interaction and international spillover impacts. Further investigation of how results of macroeconomic and enumerative approaches can be integrated would enhance the usefulness of both strands of literature to climate policy analysis going forward.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

Sea Level and Socioeconomic Uncertainty Drives High-End Coastal Adaptation Costs

Sea-level rise and associated flood hazards pose severe risks to the millions of people globally living in coastal zones. Models representing coastal adaptation and impacts are important tools to inform the design of strategies to manage these risks. Representing the often deep uncertainties influencing these risks poses nontrivial challenges. A common uncertainty characterization approach is to use a few benchmark cases to represent the range and relative probabilities of the set of possible outcomes. This has been done in coastal adaptation studies, for example, by using low, moderate, and high percentiles of an input of interest, like sea-level changes. A key consideration is how this simplified characterization of uncertainty influences the distributions of estimated coastal impacts. Here, we show that using only a few benchmark percentiles to represent uncertainty in future sea-level change can lead to overconfident projections and underestimate high-end risks as compared to using full ensembles for sea-level change and socioeconomic parametric uncertainties. When uncertainty in future sea level is characterized by low, moderate, and high percentiles of global mean sea-level rise, estimates of high-end (95th percentile) damages are underestimated by between 18% (SSP1-2.6) and 46% (SSP5-8.5). Additionally, using the 5th and 95th percentiles of sea-level scenarios underestimates the 5-95% width of the distribution of adaptation costs by a factor ranging from about two to four, depending on SSP-RCP pathway. The resulting underestimation of the uncertainty range in adaptation costs can bias adaptation and mitigation decision-making.

physics.ao-ph↗