Conference Agenda

Climate change has been identified as the largest threat to public health of the 21st century. Despite this evidence, the integrated assessment models (IAMs) used to quantify the global consequences of climate change seldom incorporate its long-term effects on public health and living conditions. This paper addresses this gap by employing an agent-based stock-flow consistent model that captures the long-run social impacts of climate change in terms of population health and well-being, within a framework that jointly analyses the co-evolution of health and economic dynamics. The model shows that climate change-induced health shocks increase mortality and hospitalization rates, leading to declines in both overall life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. The health effects, primarily via their impacts on labour supply, spill over to the economic sector, affecting GDP growth and amplifying the macroeconomic impacts of climate change. Importantly, our results reveal a vicious feedback-loop between economic and health dynamics, which amplifies the initial health impacts. Finally, the model provides a robust framework for evaluating the effects of alternative climate policies on economic growth and collective welfare, as well as for assessing different public health investment strategies aimed at mitigating the societal impacts of climate change.

Focusing on global annual averages of climatic variables can bias aggregate and distributional estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. We empirically identify dose-response functions of GDP growth rates to daily mean temperature levels and combine them with regional intra-annual climate projections of daily mean temperatures. We disentangle, for various shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs), how much of the missing impacts are due to heterogeneous warming patterns over space. Global damages in 2050 are 25% (21-28% across SSPs) higher when accounting for the shift in the shape of the entire intra-annual distribution of daily mean temperatures at the regional scale.

We study the macroeconomic responses of Chilean regions to natural disasters—floods and wildfires—using local projections and both public and novel administrative data. We document persistent GDP losses, temporary declines in consumption, and a delayed recovery of investment, accompanied by rising employment but falling wages and effective hours. These dynamics contrast with U.S. county-level evidence and point to the importance of disaster size, as well as institutional and financial conditions, in shaping post-disaster recoveries in emerging economies. We interpret the evidence through four mechanisms: destruction of productive capital, tighter financial conditions that constrain rebuilding, reallocation of production, and household wealth losses that depress consumption while supporting low-wage reconstruction employment. Embedding these mechanisms into a real business cycle model with financial frictions, we show that financial constraints are quantitatively central: absent these frictions, post-disaster losses in economic activity during the first years would be reduced by about one half. Our findings highlight the role of financial and reconstruction policies in mitigating the long-run economic costs of climate-related disasters.

Designing climate policies requires balancing environmental objectives with economic efficiency and social equity. This paper studies the long-run macroeconomic and distributional effects of carbon pricing and green support policies using a novel Integrated Assessment Model with an explicit overlapping-generations structure. This framework assesses how different instruments shape the transition path and distribute costs and benefits across age cohorts. We analyze global climate scenarios with a focus on Italy, reflecting its demographic dynamics and climate risks. Results show that while ambitious mitigation is essential to limit long-term damages, it may generate significant transition costs and uneven welfare effects. Specifically, carbon pricing tends to concentrate costs on current workingage cohorts, whereas green subsidies and public investment help smooth the transition by accelerating low-carbon technology diffusion. Delaying mitigation increases long-run economic costs and exacerbates distributional tensions, especially in aging economies. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of policy design and revenue recycling in reconciling climate goals with economic stability, pointing to the need for integrated approaches for a just and durable green transition.