James Rising

Paper: Understanding farmer crop choice in response to climate change by Solomon Hsiang

James Rising has a new working paper Weather-driven adaptation in perennial crop systems:An integrated study of Brazilian coffee yields, demonstrating how farmers in Brazil cope with changing environmental conditions by altering the portfolio of coffee crops they maintain. The analysis develops a novel structural Bayesian modeling approach that embeds reduced form modeling estimates, allowing James to solve (for the first time) the well-known "problem with perennials", i.e. the fact that analysts and policy-makes cannot generally observe the number of long-live plants (perennials) that farmers maintain on a farm. The analysis is important because it demonstrates how farmers cope with a changing climate by changing their investment decisions, sometimes amplifying the economic impact of changes in climate. 

James Rising Coffee

Book published on economic risk of climate change by GlobalPolicyLab Member

Amir Jina, James Rising, and Solomon Hsiang were coauthors on the book "Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus" published by Columbia University Press. The analysis in the book was the research behind the Risky Business initiative lead by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson and Tom Steyer. Commentary by Karen Fisher-Vanden, Michael Greenstone, Geoffrey Heal, Michael Oppenheimer, and Nicholas Stern and Bob Ward enrich the original analysis.

Get the book on Amazon.

Report on the Economic Risks of Climate Change by GlobalPolicyLab Member

Solomon Hsiang, Amir Jina, James Rising, and colleagues published a major report--The American Climate Prospectus--providing the first detailed assessment of the economic risks posed by climate change to the US economy. The analysis was the foundation of the Risky Business report, published simultaneously by Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, Tom Steyer, and colleagues.

Read the Berkeley press release.

Read the American Climate Prospectus.

Read the Risky Business Report.