Tamma Carleton
Dr. Mantis
Dr. Tamma Carleton has been awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association!
Her dissertation examined the effects of climate change on the wellbeing of populations (e.g. effects of extreme heat and crop failure on suicide rates in India), and the extent to which they are able to use resources (e.g. groundwater) to adapt to those changes (sometimes adaptation gaps remain).
Dr. Tamma Carleton has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management!
...but first she is going to enjoy a relaxing two year post doc in EPIC/Economics at the University of Chicago.
We're super proud that Tamma Carleton, one of our doctoral fellows, was named one of the top 30 Thinkers Under 30 in Policy and Social Justice by the Pacific Standard! You can read Carleton's profile here.
“As the human environmental footprint takes on a global scale, I feel that each day I have two choices. One is to shrink back from this problem and decide that as an individual I cannot influence its evolution. The other is to do everything I can to try to inform solutions. Most days, I choose the latter.”
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.
Tamma and Sol, along with co-author Marshall Burke at Stanford, published a review of the climate and violence literature in a Special Topics issue of the European Physical Journal.
The review focuses on how to use empirical evidence from historical climate-conflict relationships to make projections about the future. We present new evidence suggesting that income mitigates the impact of temperature on crime and conflict, implying that future projections may be improved by incorporating income-based adaptation. Check out a more detailed blog post about the publication on the blog G-FEED here.
Tamma Carleton wins EPA STAR
Tamma Carleton was awarded a 3-year Science To Achieve Results (STAR) graduate fellowship by the EPA to support her doctoral dissertation research!
Tamma Carleton and Solomon Hsiang visited New Zealand to work with a 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.