This note highlights a major reason to limit climate change to the lowest possible levels. This reason follows from the large increase in uncertainty associated with high levels of warming. This uncertainty arises from three sources: the change in climate itself, the change?s impacts at the...

This paper presents a model to assess the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of disaster-related asset losses on welfare, and a tool to help decision makers identify the most promising policy options to reduce welfare...

Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty...

This paper covers three policy-relevant aspects of the carbon content of electricity that are well established among integrated assessment models but under-discussed in the policy debate. First, climate stabilization at any level from 2 to 3?C requires electricity to be almost carbon-free by the...

This paper studies the optimal transition from existing coal power plants to gas and renewable power under a carbon budget. It solves a model of polluting, exhaustible resources with capacity constraints and adjustment costs (to build coal, gas, and renewable power plants). It finds that optimal...

This paper uses a Ramsey model with two types of capital to analyze the optimal transition to clean capital when polluting investment is irreversible. The cost of climate mitigation decomposes as a technical cost of using clean instead of polluting capital and a transition cost from the...

Decision makers facing abatement targets need to decide which abatement measures to implement, and in which order. This paper investigates the ability of marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves to inform this decision, reanalysing a MAC curve developed by the World Bank on Brazil. Misinterpreting...

Green industrial policies can be defined as industrial policies with an environmental goal -- or more precisely, as sector-targeted policies that affect the economic production structure with the aim of generating environmental benefits. This paper provides a framework to assess their...

This paper compares the temporal profile of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions induced by two mitigation strategies: a regulation of all emissions with a carbon price and a regulation of emissions embedded in new capital only, using capital-based instruments such as investment regulation,...

The optimal timing, sectoral distribution, and cost of greenhouse gas emission reductions is different when abatement is obtained though abatement expenditures chosen along an abatement cost curve, or through investment in low-carbon capital. In the latter framework, optimal investment costs...