News + Media: Climate Policy
Recognizing the substantial costs involved in addressing climate change through both mitigation and adaptation measures, the Paris Agreement stipulates that developed countries provide at least $100 billion a year in climate financing to developing countries, and support their transition to lower-carbon economies through international cooperation. One avenue for such cooperation is to link carbon markets—emissions trading systems that put a cap on carbon—in developed and developing regions.
On July 6, MIT Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev was a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Economic Modeling, EcoMod 2016, in Lisbon, Portugal. EcoMod is the world’s leading research, advisory and educational nonprofit network focused on promoting advanced modeling and statistical techniques in economic policy and decision-making. The annual conference draws hundreds of economic policy modelers from around the world.
To assess the likely impact of climate change on U.S. agriculture, researchers typically run a combination of climate and crop models that project how yields of maize, wheat and other key crops will change over time. But the suite of models commonly used in these simulations, which account for a wide range of uncertainty, produces outcomes that can range from substantial crop losses to bountiful harvests. These mixed results often leave farmers and other agricultural stakeholders perplexed as to how best to adapt to climate change.
