Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 8:00am - 9:30am (Shanghai time)

Designing effective climate change mitigation and adaptation policies requires comprehensive assessment of the projected damages from climate change. However,  current climate policy is informed by outdated models lacking empirical grounding. In this talk, we use subnational mortality records across 40 countries to generate data-driven estimates of the global mortality consequences of climate change. We show that both extreme cold and extreme heat raise mortality rates, especially for the elderly, the poor, and populations that experience these extremes infrequently. These heterogeneous nonlinear responses to warming lead to highly differentiated projected impacts of climate change across the globe. In this talk we focus in particular on the Asia-Pacific region, where mortality risk generally rises with a warming climate, but projected damages differ substantially within and across countries. We conclude by demonstrating how these results can be used to inform local adaptation policy within an individual city, using Chengdu, China as a case study, and point to new developments in climate science that will enable future improvements in mortality risk assessment across Asia. 

Tamma Carleton is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research combines economics with datasets and methodologies from remote sensing, data science, and climate science to quantify how environmental change and economic development shape one another. Tamma's current work focuses on climate change, water scarcity, and the use of remote sensing for global-scale environmental and socioeconomic monitoring. She is an active member of the Climate Impact Lab, an interdisciplinary team conducting an empirically-grounded global assessment of climate change impacts. Tamma joined the Bren School after a postdoc at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, MSc.'s in Environmental Change and Management as well as Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Economics from Lewis & Clark College.

Jiacan Yuan is an Associate Professor of Climatology at the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. She is interested in understanding fundamental dynamical processes of the climate system and improving climate models, which could give us stronger predictive power and more accurate risk assessment of the changing climate. Jiacan’s current work focuses on understanding the physical processes and uncertainties in climate changes, with major emphases on compound heat-humidity extremes and sea level rise. She is also an active member of the Climate Impact Lab. Before joining Fudan University, Jiacan was an Assistant Research Professor at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. She holds a Ph.D. in Meteorology from Peking University.

 This event is part of the 2021 Fall webinar series, Perfect Storm: Climate Change in Asia, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will be accepting applications from eligible juniors on who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department.  The application period opens on January 10, 2022 and runs through February 11, 2022.   For more information on the Fisher Family CDDRL Honors Program, please click here.

Join us online via Zoom on Friday, January 21st at 12:00pm (PST) to learn more! 

REGISTER NOW

CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

 

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Friday, November 12, 2021, 7:30am - 8:30am (Jakarta time)

Dr. Alatas will discuss her research on promoting vaccination in Indonesia and the impact of the pandemic on Indonesia’s society and economy more generally, including on poverty, human capital, and development.

Vivi Alatas is an  economist with passion for evidence-based solutions.  She is CEO of Asakreativita, a consulting and Edtech company that she established in 2020. Formerly she was a Lead Economist of the World Bank, where she led a team of seasoned local and international economists in producing several flagship reports for national and global audiences, including ‘Targeting Poor and Vulnerable Households in Indonesia’, ‘Making Poverty Work in Indonesia’ , ‘Indonesia’s Rising Divide’, ‘Indonesia Jobs Report’ and “Aspiring Indonesia – Expanding the Middle Class”. She has presented various of these research findings to the President, Vice President, Ministers and Deputy Ministers. She also has written several journal articles on poverty, inequality and labour issues. Some of the papers were written in collaboration with Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Angus Deaton (who was also her advisor at Princeton).

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

Professor Mobarak will discuss his research on COVID-19 response in Bangladesh and beyond, including masking, vaccine equity, and appropriate pandemic response policies in low and middle income countries.

He will provide an overview of the coauthored MaskNorm study, a randomized-trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh during COVID-19 that demonstrates a scalable and effective method to promote mask adoption and reduce symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. He will also discuss efficient last-mile vaccine delivery in low-income countries and related research on the lower epidemiological and welfare value of social distancing in lower-income countries.

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics.

Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at Innovations for Poverty Action, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE.

Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Kenya, Malawi and Sierra Leone. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. For example, he is scaling and testing strategies to address seasonal poverty using migration subsidies or consumption loans in Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.

Mobarak is collaborating with the government of Bangladesh, NGOs and think-tanks such as BRAC and BIGD, the major Bangladeshi telecom providers, Innovations for Poverty Action, UNDP, other economists, epidemiologists, computer scientists, and public health researchers to devise evidence-based COVID response strategies for Bangladesh and for other developing countries. The approach and results have been covered by BBC, Foreign Policy, New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, and media in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, among others.  The work is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Givewell.org, the Global Innovation Fund, and Yale Macmillan Center.

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