Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/113964 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Nota di Lavoro No. 64.2015
Publisher: 
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), Milano
Abstract: 
Greenhouse gas policies confront the trade-off between the costs of reducing emissions and the benefits of avoided climate change. The risk of uncertain and potentially irreversible catastrophes is an important issue related to the latter, and one that has not yet been well incorporated into economic models for climate change policy analysis. This paper demonstrates a multistage stochastic programming framework for catastrophe modeling with endogenous uncertainty, applied to a benchmark integrated assessment model. This study moves beyond recent catastrophe or tipping point studies with arbitrary risk, instead investigating the specific threat of the uncertain collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), characterized in accordance with recent expert elicitations, empirical results, and physical relationships. The stochastic DICE-WAIS model introduced here informs risk management strategies that balance uncertain future climate change impacts with the costs of mitigation investments today. This work finds that accounting for the consequences of the possible WAIS collapse in a stochastic setting with endogenous uncertainty leads to more stringent climate policy recommendations (increasing the CO2 control rate by an additional 4% of global emissions and raising the social cost of carbon by $10), reflecting the need to hedge against uncertainties with downside risk as well as pursue precautionary mitigation.
Subjects: 
Climate Change Policy
Sea Level Rise
Ice Sheet Collapse
Endogenous Uncertainty
Stochastic Optimization
Greenhouse Gas Mitigation
Risk Management
JEL: 
C61
D61
D81
H23
Q54
Q58
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.