Round Table on the Distribution of Costs of Climate Change Impacts and Policies

22 October 2015

Watch the recordings of the Round Table

The distributional implications of impacts are increasingly playing a major role in political and socio-economic discussions on climate change, as recently noticed in the rich debate after the publication of the encyclical Laudatio Si.

Ambitious climate policies will also have significant distributive implications, both within and among countries and between generations. Yet most academic efforts, at least in the economics domain, have focused in the design and evaluation of climate policies in terms of cost-effectiveness.

This roundtable intended to foster a deeper understanding on the distributional issues associated to climate change impacts and corrective policies, incorporating academics specialized in different areas of climate change economics and policy, a former policymaker and a Jesuit with relevant involvement in these matters.

The roundtable, which was part of the FSR Climate 2015 Annual Conference on the assessment of European climate policies, took place on 22 October at the Palazzo Guadagni Strozzi Sacrati (Presidenza Regione Toscana).

Speakers

José I. García-Jiménez

José I. García-Jiménez is Director of the Jesuit European Social Centre in Brussels. Editor of Ecojesuit. He joined the Jesuits in 1983 and has been catholic priest since 1998. He has been Lecturer of Agricultural Economics and Social Ethics at INEA-College of Agriculture (University of Valladolid, Spain) in 1998-2008. He is Graduate in Economics & Business Administration (ICADE, Madrid, 1992), in Philosophy (Complutense University, Madrid, 1996) and in Theology (Comillas, University , Madrid, 1998).

Xavier Labandeira (Moderator)

Xavier Labandeira is Director of the FSR-Climate, part-time professor at the EUI and professor of Economics at the University of Vigo. His research lies at the boundaries between Public, Energy and Environmental Economics and his work has been published in leading academic journals of the field. He has led many research projects in Spain and abroad and has been a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the elaboration of its Fifth Assessment Report. Labandeira is also director of Economics for Energy, a private research centre specialising in the economic analysis of energy issues and aimed to create and disseminate rigorous, neutral and useful knowledge in the field. He is also coordinator of Ergon, a research platform aimed to explore in depth the economic aspects of energy efficiency.

Ian Parry

Ian Parry is the Principal Environmental Fiscal Policy Expert in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. Prior to joining the IMF in 2010, Parry held the Allen V. Kneese Chair in Environmental Economics at Resources for the Future. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.Parry’s research focuses on analytical and spreadsheet models to quantify for different countries the economic impacts and efficient levels of a wide range of environmental, energy, and transportation policies. Parry has published numerous papers in professional journals and is the co-author of several books on climate and energy policy.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith is a Professor of Economics at University College London.He began his career in the Government Economic Service, and then worked at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), where he was Deputy Director from 1990 to 1997. Stephen Smith joined UCL full-time as Professor of Economics in 1997. He was head of the Economics Department (1997-2002) and Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences (2007-13). At UCL he teaches public economics and environmental economics to undergraduate and graduate students.

Martin Weitzman

Martin L. Weitzman is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Previously he was on the faculties of MIT and Yale. He has been elected as a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely in many leading economic journals and written three books. Weitzman’s interests in economics are broad and he has served as consultant for several well-known organizations. His current research is focused on environmental economics, including climate change, the economics of catastrophes, cost-benefit analysis, long-run discounting, green accounting, and comparison of alternative instruments for controlling pollution.