Discounting climate change

Values in Time Discounting

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. (Stern review on the economics of climate change, 2006) and their critics (most prominently Dasgupta in Comments on the Stern r...

DISCOUNTING ACROSS SPACE AND TIME IN CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENT A Dissertation in Geography

Discounting is traditionally conceptualized as the comparison of the value of gains or losses that occur at different times. It endeavors to incorporate how humans trade off values to be received in the future versus value received immediately into economic analysis. Discounting has emerged as a key factor in assessments of climate change and other long-term environmental issues. However, the t...

Space-Time Discounting in Climate Change Adaptation

Background: Space-Time Discounting Discounting is typically defined as the process of comparing the values of costs and benefits that occur at different times. This definition neglects where costs and benefits occur. For example, we might discount future costs and benefits because we care less about the welfare of people in the future, but we might also discount the welfare of people in differe...

Numerical Analysis of Non-constant Discounting with an Application to Climate Change Control∗

When current decisions affect welfare in the far-distant future, as with climate change, the use of a declining discount rate provides potentially important modeling flexibility. The difficulty of analyzing models with non-constant discounting limits their application. We describe and provide software (available online) to implement an algorithm to numerically obtain a Markov Perfect Equilibriu...

The Social Evaluation of Intergenerational Policies and Its Application to Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change

Assessment of climate change policies requires aggregation of costs and benefits over time and across generations, a process ordinarily done through discounting. Choosing the correct discount rate has proved to be controversial and highly consequential. To clarify past analysis and guide future work, we decompose discounting along two dimensions. First, we distinguish discounting by individuals...

Stern and his critics on discounting and climate change