Abstract:
We calculate the social cost of carbon (SCC) under stochastic climate volatility resulting from uncertainty about future climate risk regimes where weather extremes are becoming more frequent and intense. Using a stochastic dynamic integrated climate-economy model where representative agents are endowed with Duffie-Epstein recursive preferences, we find that climate volatility risks substantially increase the SCC both in the business-as-usual and optimal abatement policy scenario. We also show that switching to a regime with more intense disasters increases the SCC more than a switch to a regime with more frequent disasters for equal expected value. Overall we show that stochastic volatility has a major impact on the SCC.Classification-JEL: G12, G13, Q51, Q54