Several efforts are underway to draw on recent literature for improving damage functions and to generate new damage estimates. In particular, the Climate Impact Lab is undertaking an effort to quantify and monetize damages at a fine spatial scale, relying on rigorous empirical methods to develop plausibly causal estimates for several sectors, including health (Carleton et al. 2020), energy (Rode et al. 2021), labor productivity (Rode et al. 2020), agriculture, conflict, and sea level rise.[2] Other research efforts have sought to update the damage function for one sector in an existing IAM based on an updated review of the empirical literature on climate impacts pertaining to that sector (e.g., Moore et al. (2017) for agriculture damages in the FUND model). Damage functions specific to impacts within the U.S. have also been developed and improved for a number of sectors, such as impacts on coastal property, mortality due to extreme temperatures, transportation infrastructure, electricity supply and demand, water quality, recreation, and allergies (Neumann et al. 2020) and impacts of climate change on air quality and human health (Fann et al. 2021). There is also an emerging literature focused on incorporating interactions among
- ↑ In many cases, the three IAMs used different studies for calibration. This is particularly true of FUND, which used studies relating to different subsectors of the model, whereas DICE and PAGE did not have as detailed a sectoral breakdown. That means that summing across these different models is likely valid in all but a few isolated cases. The blue bars include studies uncovered from a comprehensive literature review in the economics literature (and a few others in public health or relevant disciplines) by the Climate Impact Lab (CIL) through early 2016. Each of the studies counted in blue was determined by CIL to have employed a research design that allowed for the causal interpretation of results (Greenstone 2016).
- ↑ The Climate Impact Lab is a multidisciplinary collaboration of climate scientists, economists, computational experts, researchers, analysts, and students working to build empirically derived, local-level estimates of climate change damages and an empirically based SC-CO2. More information on the Climate Impact Lab can be found at: http://www.impactlab.org/.
