Malcolm Fairbrother

Speaker

Dr Malcolm Fairbrother, School of Geographical Sciences

Abstract

If national governments could choose their countries climates, what kinds of climates - particularly temperatures and precipitation - would they choose? 

The question of national climatic preferences is not whimsical, but highly relevant in the context of impending policy decisions to be made with respect to geoengineering; conflicting national preferences with respect to geoengineering could even precipitate international conflicts.

This paper confronts this question by modelling the relationship between climate and economic growth - exploiting climatic and economic variation across countries, within countries, and over time.

The paper reviews the existing literature on the question of how climate shapes economic output and growth; briefly introduces the "G-Econ" dataset we use to investigate this issue; presents our methodological approach, which relies on the innovative application of multilevel modelling techniques; and then discusses what the models can tell us about the likely consequences of different climate change and geoengineering scenarios for different countries.

View the presentation from the seminar.