The rapid expansion of oil sands production in northern Alberta is under scrutiny worldwide due to concerns about its environmental, social, and economic impacts. Environmental concerns include climate change impacts from CO2 emissionsalongwithmore local environmental impacts such as dead birds, cancer clusters, and destruction of boreal forests.Within Canada, oil sands have become an important...

We examine the general relationships between climate and society in the US Southwest providing a context for the ongoing Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) Project. We review 5 key contextual elements of the region—its demography, economy, land, water, and institutions and values—and indicate how these conditions predispose certain social groups, economic sectors, or geographic areas...

As soon as practical, Earth’s low-cost, abundant, environmentally attractive fusion energy resources should be applied to the urgent global challenges of climate change, energy supply, economic growth, and the developing world. A National Ignition Campaign is under way at the recently completed National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to ignite high-gain...

Midcentury targets have been proposed as a guide to climate change policy that can link long-term goals to shorter-term actions. However no explicit mitigation analyses have been carried out of the relationship between midcentury conditions and longer-term outcomes. Here we use an integrated assessment modeling framework with a detailed representation of the energy sector to examine the depende...

This paper attempts to explore the implications of climate change for economic development strategies in cities in the South. In particular, it examines whether climate change makes industrialization an obsolete development strategy for these cities. It starts by examining the effects of climate change and the challenges posed for the cities concerned, followed by a discussion of the role of in...

This paper studies the effects of global warming in a descriptive model of endogenous growth with multiple regions. It is assumed that deviations from the pre-industrial greenhouse gas concentration, which implies a change in the global surface temperature, negatively affect aggregate output and the marginal product of capital. The paper derives optimal abatement ratios in the non-cooperative w...

It is widely recognized that many African economies are being transformed by rapid economic growth driven largely by rising demand for the abundant natural resources scattered across the African continent. I critically review the mainstream gamechanging dynamics driving this process, with special reference to a set of influential policy-oriented documents. This is followed by an analysis of les...

The twentieth century has been extremely unusual in that economic growth rates have been extraordinarily high. At the same time, costs of this growth have also been extremely high. These have been in the form of environmental degradation, depletion of planetary resources and species, climate change, and adverse social change. Since many of the effects of growth go outside the marketplace, evalu...

Back in the early 1970s, Partha Dasgupta realized that the economic models of the time were neglecting an entire class of capital assets: natural resources. Over the course of his career, Dasgupta, an economist at the University of Cambridge and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, has worked to put “natural capital” on an equal footing with other capital assets, exploring h...

We apply a probabilistic approach to the evaluation of climate change impacts in the Zambeze River Valley. The economic modeling relies on an economywide modeling approach. Taking a distribution of shocks as inputs, we create hybrid frequency distributions of the potential economic impacts of climate change for Mozambique. The approach identifies an explicit range of potential outcomes and asso...