Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 8:00am – 9:30am (Shanghai time)

Designing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation policies requires comprehensive assessment of the projected damages from climate change. However,  current climate policy is informed by outdated models lacking empirical grounding. In this talk, we use subnational mortality records across 40 countries to generate data-driven estimates of the global mortality consequences of climate change. We show that both extreme cold and extreme heat raise mortality rates, especially for the elderly, the poor, and populations that experience these extremes infrequently. These heterogeneous nonlinear responses to warming lead to highly differentiated projected impacts of climate change across the globe. In this talk we focus in particular on the Asia-Pacific region, where mortality risk generally rises with a warming climate, but projected damages differ substantially within and across countries. We conclude by demonstrating how these results can be used to inform local adaptation policy within an individual city, using Chengdu, China as a case study, and point to new developments in climate science that will enable future improvements in mortality risk assessment across Asia.

Tamma Carleton is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research combines economics with datasets and methodologies from remote sensing, data science, and climate science to quantify how environmental change and economic development shape one another. Tamma’s current work focuses on climate change, water scarcity, and the use of remote sensing for global-scale environmental and socioeconomic monitoring. She is an active member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary team conducting an empirically-grounded global assessment of climate change impacts. Tamma joined the Bren School after a postdoc at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, MSc.’s in Environmental Change and Management as well as Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Lewis & Clark College.

Jiacan Yuan is an Associate Professor of Climatology at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. She is interested in understanding fundamental dynamical processes of the climate system and improving climate models, which could give us stronger predictive power and more accurate risk assessment of the changing climate. Jiacan’s current work focuses on understanding the physical processes and uncertainties in climate changes, with major emphases on compound heat-humidity extremes and sea level rise. She is also an active member of the Climate Impact Lab. Before joining Fudan University, Jiacan was an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Peking University.

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