Togo has found a high-tech way to identify people who need financial help in the pandemic and send them emergency cash. They use computers to search for clues in satellite images, then distribute money through mobile phones.
The pandemic has been tough for Eric Dossekpli. The 49-year-old farmer from Anfoin Avele, a town in the west African country of Togo, had trouble selling his peanuts, black-eyed peas, maize and cassava at the market. Customers couldn't buy much because of their own pandemic income loss. Then he couldn't afford fertilizer to keep growing his crops.
We launched the Climate Impact Lab website. The Impact Lab is a collaboration with team members at University of Chicago, Rutgers, and Rhodium Group to construct an empirically founded basis for the global social cost of carbon.
This collaboration produced the American Climate Prospectus in 2014.
Tamma Carleton was awarded a 3-year Science To Achieve Results (STAR) graduate fellowship by the EPA to support her doctoral dissertation research!
Patrick Baylis has accepted a post-doc at Stanford FSE and an assistant professorship at University of British Columbia Economics Department!
Based on its global media coverage, Almetric listed Hsiang's paper Global Nonlinear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production as one the top 100 research findings of 2015. See the article's metrics here and some of its global coverage here.
Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang published an Op-Ed in the LA Times explaining what we do and do not know about linkages between climate and social conflict, in response to numerous claims by politicians (an inquiries by journalists).
Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang published a letter in the Wall Street Journal responding to Bjorn Lomborg's claims about cost-benefit analysis of climate change policies.
Read about the research behind the letter here.
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.
Tamma Carleton, Dan Hammer, and Solomon Hsiang visited the Tuaropaki Trust in New Zealand to work with this Maori Land Trust in an effort to develop new frameworks and techniques for measuring sustainable development.
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang led the first Summer Workshop in Climate Economics, where fifteen doctoral students from around the country learned econometric methods and worked with faculty and postdoc mentors to complete new research projects studying the impacts of climate change around the world.
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.
The NSF awarded $2.9M to Berkeley for “Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century (DS421),” a new National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT). DS421 is an interdisciplinary graduate training program at UC Berkeley at the interface of data, social and natural sciences.
Amir Jina and Solomon Hsiang published an Op-Ed "Facing the storm after the storm in Vanuatu" in Reuters explaining the potential impact of Tropical Cyclone Pam on the economic trajectory of Vanuatu.
Solomon Hsiang delivered a Keynote address "The Emerging Age of Data-Driven Policy Design" at Strata + Hadoop 2015.
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, 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.
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.
Hsiang, Burke & Miguel (Science, 2013) was listed by Discover magazine as one of the top 100 findings in 2013 from across all sciences.
Solomon Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel published an Op-Ed in the New York Times Sunday Review describing their research linking climate to conflict and the implications for climate change policy.
Solomon Hsiang was recognized by the American Geophysical Union for "significant contributions in the application and use of the Earth and space sciences to solve societal problems." See the award citation by Michael Oppenheimer.