The impacts of climate change are expected to create numerous challenges for cities. This report synthesizes key points raised in a series of discussions among “adaptation leaders” from fourteen cities around the world. Critical issues for urban adaptation that emerged from the discussions...

The IPCC Special Report finds that current policies are not sufficient to limit global warming to well below 1.5°C, and that the gap between the actions on the ground and the required changes in order to meet the global goal is widening rapidly. One reason is that scientific assessments based...

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary estimate of the climate change damages to society from an additional emission of carbon dioxide (CO₂). US agencies are now required to apply the SCC to assess the potential benefits of CO₂ reductions in federal regulations, including rules and...

If one nation damages another, what are its obligations? This question can be approached and understood in diverse ways, but it is concretized in debates over the social cost of carbon, which is sometimes described as the linchpin of national climate policy. The social cost of carbon, meant to...

We develop a generic and transparent calibration strategy for climate models used in economics.The key idea is to choose the free model parameters to match the output of large-scale Earth System Models, which are run on pre-defined future emissions scenarios and collected in the Coupled Model...

In its ideal form, arbitrariness review is an instrument for promoting “deliberative democracy” – a system that combines reason-giving with political accountability. Under arbitrariness review in its current form, courts tend to embrace the “hard look doctrine,” which has a procedural...

One of the central ways that the costs of global warming are incorporated into U.S. law is in cost-benefit analysis of federal regulations. In 2010, to standardize analyses, an Interagency Working Group (IAWG) established a central estimate of the social cost of carbon (SCC) of $21/tCO2 drawn...

As reporting GHG emissions becomes mandatory in the financial sector, the methods by which emissions are calculated will grow in importance for their impact on the resulting metric. Progress is underway in both the public and private financial sectors to embed emissions accounting standards, but...

This study comprehensively assesses the immediate effects of extreme weather conditions and high concentrations of ambient air pollution on population health. For Germany and the years 1999 to 2008, we link the universe of all 170 million hospital admissions, along with all 8 million deaths,...

The social rate of discount is a crucial driver of the social cost of carbon (SCC), i.e. the expected present discounted value of marginal damages resulting from emitting one ton of carbon today. Policy makers should set carbon prices to the SCC using a carbon tax or a competitive permits...