Seminar on Ecological Economics

ICTA-UAB organises a new Ecological economics seminar with double lectures on related topics, by Daniel Horen Greenford and Corey Lesk. The seminar is organized by Aljosa Slamersak & Jeroen van den Bergh.

Seminar on Ecological Economics


Lectures by Daniel Horen Greenford and Corey Lesk


Date: Wednesday, May 8th 2024
Time: From 14h to 15.30h
Venue: Sala Montseny (room Z/022 & Z/023) and online https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84572764250?pwd=RXIxUjkxYU4wVGRkSm9qL2tKQ0prQT09


Lecture 1 by Corey Lesk - Future emissions and warming under climate-energy-economy feedbacks

A common vision of the climate transition involves mass deployment of adaptation and mitigation infrastructure, which will result in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. In this talk, I argue that these emissions could represent a feedback in the climate system that should be considered in climate policy. I show initial constraints on the scale of transition energy needs and emissions, and progress towards representing them dynamically in the WITCH integrated assessment model (IAM). Results suggest that climate-energy-economy feedbacks could meaningfully alter the trajectory of the climate transition and future warming compared to scenarios from most IAMs, which generally do not simulate these processes. They also imply that to ensure an effective transition, research and policy should consider the societal response to climate change as an endogenous feature of the climate system.

Bio: Corey Lesk is a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College in the USA, where he holds fellowships from the Fonds de recherche du Québec and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. He works on climate impacts on agriculture, the role of vegetation in the water cycle, and climate-energy-economy feedbacks.

Lecture 2 by Daniel Horen Greenford - You can't grow the economy cleanly by expanding services

Many advocate for green growth via a shift to a more service-based economy. But this fails to consider the impacts associated with the wages paid to those working in these industries. Here we show that unless wealthy people change how they consume, growing the service sector, and likewise employing more people in it, will exacerbate environmental impacts. We find that for a unit value production, all sectors have roughly the same impacts in terms of GHG emissions, water consumption, and land use. We propose that any structural change to the economy must be accompanied by a reduction of materially-intensive consumption by affluent people.

Bio: Daniel Horen Greenford is a postdoctoral researcher working on topics in ecological and climate economics. His current interests include environmental impacts and economic damages driven by affluence.