Funding Years: 2024-2026

Nobel Prize-winning economist William Nordhaus has described the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) as the “most important single economic concept in the economics of climate change” (Nordhaus, 2017). As an estimate of the monetized damage to society from a ton of carbon emissions, the SCC is used in designing regulations with over $1 trillion of benefits in the United States alone, influencing many sectors of the economy (Nordhaus, 2017). These SCC estimates are generated by integrated assessment models (IAMs), which account for the monetized damages from climate change. However, IAMs ignore some of the key costs of climate change. Building upon GIVE, a new IAM model incorporating the latest climate science, we propose to identify and model categories of damages thus far unaccounted for—such as wildfire, drought, and disease—with the potential to significantly increase the resulting SCC estimate. Our Global Challenges Research Team (GCRT) brings together 5 faculty members across 4 Colleges to take advantage of a unique combination of expertise available at CSU.

Principal Investigators:

• Anders Fremstad, Associate Professor, Economics
• Jesse Burkhardt, Associate Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
• Terry Iverson, Associate Professor, Economics
• Srijani Baral, Assistant Professor, Forest and Rangeland Stewardship
• Shantanu Jathar, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering