Conference Agenda

Do Economists Give Good Environmental Policy Advice? Externalities in Broader Economic Context\n\nLint Barrage, ETH Zurich, Switzerland\nEconomists’ environmental policy advice is often based on efficiency-maximizing approaches in models of large, mature market economies with a single distortion – an environmental externality. In practice, the advice emerging from such frameworks – such as that climate change should be addressed by pricing carbon globally at the social cost of carbon – may require rethinking for several reasons. These include political economy and implementation constraints, distributional concerns, and, perhaps surprisingly, even efficiency considerations, as a growing body of work shows that policy recommendations can change qualitatively once environmental risks and policies interact with other empirically relevant frictions. Key examples range from innovation externalities and industrial linkages to informality in energy systems and overlapping pollutants. This talk will highlight recent work in this domain and suggest a broader research agenda on environmental policy design in richer economic settings.\n 

Effective policy responses and interventions to address climate change have lagged behind technological advances. Among the reasons is that an understanding of how policies affect citizens’ values and beliefs, and how those values and beliefs may in turn affect policy effectiveness, feasibility and durability is lacking.\n \nClimate policies have direct effects on the incentives and constraints under which individuals make choices, but they also have indirect effects through their impacts on people’s norms, values and beliefs. These indirect effects can erode or reinforce the aims of a policy. For example, building low-carbon infrastructure can increase the desirability of low-carbon behaviors, while the prevalence of associated norms can further reinforce those behaviors. Yet, policies can also backfire when they do not account for the effects of policies on people’s beliefs and values.\n \nOur thematic session features contributions that document how policies or interventions might affect values and beliefs in ways that could reinforce or undermine the policy. Specifically, they elucidate our understanding of the spillovers of targeted interventions on attitudes towards climate change, the lasting effects of peer influence on dietary preferences, and the influence of a climate education program for teachers on teacher and student climate policy preferences.\n \nThis topic of this thematic session is of critical importance given current and emerging governance challenges surrounding climate change mitigation, including recent backlash towards health and climate policy in many parts of the world. The dynamics covered by our contributions suggest that accounting for the direct and indirect effects of policies on preferences, norms and beliefs may be critical to improve how we approach the design of climate policy.

Knowledge of the likely impacts of climatic events, in addition to when such events will occur, enables policymakers to make better targeted and cost-effective decisions to strengthen resilient food systems. Climate change is increasingly undermining all four pillars of food and nutritional security: availability, access, utilization, and stability. While the region continues to maintain high aggregate food production, intensifying extremes such as heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires are exposing systemic vulnerabilities in agrifood systems, supply chains, and food markets, as well as households’ ability to afford a balanced and healthy diet. These impacts are not only biophysical but also socioeconomic, amplifying risks related to food prices, affordability, and dietary quality, particularly among vulnerable population groups such as low-income households. Strengthening the evidence base for such solutions is therefore central to guiding policy and investment decisions toward more resilient and equitable food systems. \n\nThis session will explore how climate change is reshaping agrifood systems, driving volatility in production, markets, and prices, and how policies and innovations can be designed to strengthen resilience, in the context of the imperative for all sectors of the economy to be on net-zero compatible pathways. Bringing together experts from the EEA, FAO, and leading research institutions, we will discuss how climate-smart strategies, risk management instruments, and impact-based monitoring, and early warning systems can support proactive planning and policies for farmers, workers, and decisionmakers. The session will highlight how combining data-driven evidence with local knowledge can improve the design, targeting, and evaluation of adaptation and social protection policies such as safety nets. A panel discussion with diverse stakeholders will address the implications of integrating impact evidence and data products into national and regional policy frameworks to safeguard food security in an uncertain climate. 

Flood risk is no longer only a hydrological or engineering challenge: it is increasingly shaped—and sometimes amplified—by human behavior, political polarization, mobility, and information ecosystems. This special session brings together a set of papers that collectively argue for a more integrated “socio-hydrological” view of floods, where exposure, vulnerability, and recovery are co-produced by households, institutions, markets, and public narratives.\n \nFirst, several contributions show that who is exposed to flood and hazard risk is not random. Evidence from Florida links residential sorting and natural hazard exposure to partisan affiliation, using a large-scale voter panel and hazard risk indices—highlighting how political geography and migration/party switching can reshape risk landscapes, with direct implications for preparedness and disaster relief design.\n \nNext, research on inland flooding demonstrates that disasters can reconfigure communities through migration and housing-tenure shifts: using the 2008 Cedar Rapids flood and a national panel, the paper documents sizable post-flood declines in homeownership driven by owner out-migration and renter in-migration—raising concerns about long-run inequality and wealth accumulation in hazard-prone neighborhoods.\n \nSecond, the session emphasizes that floods also transform preferences and decision-making in heterogeneous ways. Experimental evidence from frequently flooded areas in Bolivia suggests that exposure interacts with identity (e.g., native mother tongue) and can be associated with greater tolerance toward risk, losses, and ambiguity—challenging one-size-fits-all behavioral assumptions that often underpin policy design.\n \nComplementing this behavioral lens, evidence from Bangladesh examines whether social assistance can buffer longer-lasting welfare impacts of monsoon flooding: transfers (especially when paired with behavior change communication) help protect savings and improve diet quality for both men and women, pointing to scalable pathways for climate-resilient social protection.\n \nFinally, the session recognizes that flood impacts depend not only on water and welfare, but also on information. Analysis of the 2024 DANA floods in Spain shows that mis/disinformation content can achieve disproportionate visibility and engagement on social media, potentially undermining response and increasing insecurity—motivating policy discussions on crisis-sensitive platform governance and verified communication channels.\n \nTaken together, these papers motivate a special session that connects exposure and sorting, behavioral adaptation, migration and housing, social protection, and digital narratives into one coherent agenda: improving flood resilience requires policy that is not only technically sound, but socially targeted, behaviorally informed, and communication-aware.

Climate change is altering the environments in which human capital is accumulated and utilized, with implications that span from early-life learning and skill formation to adult health, safety, and labor productivity. This thematic session will assemble empirical contributions that examine how climate shocks and climate policy affect educational outcomes, worker health and safety, the productivity of labor across sectors, and mortality. A particular focus will be on how institutions, technology, and policy affect realized impacts, including potential adaptation responses, as well as on distributional implications, including heterogeneous effects by income, region, and occupation. 

In this session, we aim to bring together new empirical evidence that is relevant for improving forest conservation. The papers cover a wide range of topics, but all have in common that they focus on forest conservation and demonstrate methodological advances in deriving counterfactual forest loss. The first paper develops an approach based on a neural network to predict counterfactual forest loss for protected areas in the Amazon. Recently, carbon offset programs like REDD+ have been heavily criticized because they often overpredict counterfactual forest loss ex ante. In the second paper of this proposed session, a new method is benchmarked for protected areas in Africa, using as comparison an ex-post analysis using a synthetic control approach. The third paper analyzes whether Brazil’s technology-driven improvements in forest monitoring and conservation made farmers change how they deforest, in order to evade detection. This is based on a rare example of a credible instrumental variables strategy. The fourth paper estimates the causal effect of frontier settlements in Latin America, exploiting random variation in the timing and location of Mennonite settlements. The fifth paper is a global geospatial econometric analysis, which quantifies how forests mitigate the adverse economic effects of droughts. The final paper is a pan-tropical analysis of an extremely large dataset of satellite measured crop yields and forest cover dynamics, to estimate the effect of the former on the later, and an extensive investigation into heterogenous treatment effects. 

This session examines how multiple environmental and climate policy instruments interact in practice, including issues of complementarity, redundancy, sequencing, and constraints on effectiveness. It brings together empirical evidence on payments for environmental services, regulatory instruments, conservation policies, and agricultural and climate interventions, emphasizing how these policies operate jointly—rather than in isolation— particularly in development contexts. This framing highlights a shared focus on PES, regulatory instruments, conservation policies, and agricultural and climate interventions operating jointly.