UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, the reader will find four essays examining the empirical effects of future climate change, while accounting for both adaptation as well as its costs. In three of these essays, we uncover climate impacts that result in a substantially altered future from

our present reality: crop yields in sharp decline (while accounting for costly adaptation); cropped areas shifted away from present-day locations; and increased human mortality, with costly adaptations undertaken to avoid even further excess deaths. In one essay, we estimate that the impact of climate change on global energy consumption will be small in aggregate due to offsetting effects from more hot days but fewer cold days, though regional disparities may be important.

Several conclusions follow. First, accounting for both adaptation and its costs is important for grounding an accurate estimate of the social cost of carbon. Second, performing these analyses at a global scale and with high spatial resolution reveals important sources of heterogeneity -- both in impacts as well as in the magnitude of adaptation. Third, results such as these may be useful inputs to the Integrated Assessment Modeling community, improving the empirical grounding of the damage functions employed.

In these essays, we seek to include information from as globally representative a sample as possible, and where possible estimate heterogeneous effects for the global rich versus the global poor. We also seek to graphically illustrate projected effects so that non-expert readers can locate themselves within the empirical estimates we produce.