Session

DescriptionAnthropogenic climate change and the associated economic damages constitute a substantial negative externality. Economic policy can mitigate this externality and potentially even lead to significant welfare gains across all economic agents. In order to determine the optimal mitigation strategies, economists need to develop quantitative models that produce a realistic link between CO2 emissions and global warming and that are informed by research in climate science as presented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, that is, the “state-of-the-art” in climate science. One fundamental challenge is that the computational costs for Earth system models are so significant that they are not suitable for studying the two-way feedback between the Earth system and human behavior. Therefore, economic models focusing on this feedback have to rely on a much-simplified representation of the Earth system component. To this end, this minisymposium aims to bring together leading scientists from computational economics, machine learning, and climate science that work at the intersection of coupling the two fields in a sound and tractable way.