disasters
Solomon Hsiang and Trevor Houser published an Op-Ed in the New York Times explaining the extraordinary potential economic consequences of Hurricane Maria. By their calculation, Maria could lower Puerto Rican incomes by 21% over the next 15 years, undoing roughly 26 years of economic development. This could make Maria the most costly Atlantic storm (in percentage terms) in history.
Their calculations and more context are provided in the Climate Impact Lab Insights Blog.
Solomon Hsiang surveyed new approaches to valuing planetary scale assets, using climate as an example, to other Kavli Fellows at the annual symposium run at the National Academy of Sciences.
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang published an article in Science discussing and synthesizing the methods and results used to understand the impact of climate from the last decade. We demonstrate how findings across the literature and sectors are linked, identify commonalities across numerous studies, and compute how much (i) various aspects of the current climate contribute to to historical social outcomes, (ii) how much climate change to date has affected outcomes, and (iii) quantitative projections of the future. We identify that understanding "adaptation gaps" is the most important area for future research.
The Congressional Budget Office used calculations in Hsiang & Jina (2014) and The American Climate Prospectus to inform their recent report on Potential Increases in Hurricane Damage in the United States: Implications for the Federal Budget. See a summary of the report by Politico here.
Hurricane Katrina
Kyle Meng and Solomon Hsiang published an Op-Ed in the Guardian explaining how the coming El Nino is likely to affect the 3 trillion people living in the tropics and what we can do about it.
The first Quartz Chart of the Year award was given to a figure made by the Economist to depict findings in our research paper on the economic costs of large scale environmental disasters.
Solomon Hsiang delivered a keynote talk "Quantifying the Economic Cost of Climate Change" at the RMS Exceedence conference, where thousands of insurance and reinsurance executives and analysts met in Washington DC.
