Conference Agenda

Through shifts in temperatures, sea levels, precipitation patterns, and extreme weather events, climate change is poised to inflict severe costs on societies. Tipping points, characterized by qualitative changes to elements of the Earth system following small perturbations, can drastically alter the trajectory of climate change impacts. Since understanding their potential effects is key for prudent mitigation policy and risk management, we propose a thematic session to present new research on the social costs and financial risks of climate tipping points and their integration in integrated assessment models (IAMs). The session opens with two papers assessing how structural model variations, including the consideration of tipping points, affect the social cost of carbon (SCC) in an evidentiary synthesis that combines a meta-analysis, an expert survey and a synthetic construction of SCC estimates using machine learning (paper 1) or in a modular, meta-analytic IAM combining different structural model modifications (paper 2). As such, these papers quantify the relative importance of tipping points for climate change impacts and their interactions with other crucial modeling features. Using META, the leading IAM for assessing tipping points, the following two papers investigate how an advanced representation of tipping points alters the SCC and the social costs of methane. Paper 3, among other things, implements a new Antarctic Ice Sheet module updates META’s downscaling of temperature change to CMIP6, amongst other improvements, and estimates the economic benefits of methane action, alongside new national-level and global SC-CH4 estimates, while paper 4 adds a new impact channel to assessing the costs of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) slowdown. Finally, paper 5 quantifies the financial risks for stock investors posed by tipping points, underscoring the necessity of integrating them into risk assessments and stress tests. Together, the papers advance our understanding of the complex interplay between environmental change and economic impacts and yield important insights for climate policy.

Pesticide use in agriculture leads to environmental pollution and major health concerns. Two recent trends in farming have brought pesticides front and center: genetically modified (GM), herbicide-tolerant crops, and increased homogenization of agricultural landscapes. Here we present new insights on the impact of GM crop adoption on pesticide use and spillovers across farms and countries. The adoption of herbicide-tolerant GM crops has led to large increases in herbicide use – specifically the herbicide they are designed to tolerate. The paper by Ed Rubin and Emmett Saulnier focuses on the health effects of the increase in the use of herbicides (glyphosate). The paper by Anouch Missirian shows that the herbicide (dicamba) externalities from dicamba-tolerant GM adoption force the adoption of that new technology in neighboring fields. The paper by Jean-Sauveur Ay, Estelle Gozlan, and Emmanuel Paroissien looks at the pesticide interactions across farms through pest stocks. The final paper by Vasundhara Gaur, Frederik Noack, and Eduardo Souza-Rodrigues analyzes pesticide and spillovers across countries through general equilibrium effects.