Knowledge of factors that trigger human response to climate change is crucial for effective climate change policy communication. Climate change has been claimed to have low salience as a risk issue because it cannot be directly experienced. Still, personal factors such as strength of belief in local effects of climate change have been shown to correlate strongly with responses to climate change...

Currently there is a lack of quantitative information regarding the driving factors of vegetation dynamics in post-Soviet Central Asia. Insufficient knowledge also exists concerning vegetation variability across sub-humid to arid climatic gradients as well as vegetation response to different land uses, from natural rangelands to intensively irrigated croplands. In this study, we analyzed the en...

The risk of malaria transmission worldwide is expected to increase with climate change. In order to estimate the welfare implications, we analyse the factors that explain willingness to pay to avoid malaria morbidity using a meta-analysis. We compare multiple regression models via a cross-validation exercise to assess best fit, the first in the meta-analysis literature to do so. Weighted random...

This paper estimates the impact of climate change on the prevalence of criminal activity in the United States. The analysis is based on a panel of monthly crime, temperature, and precipitation data for 2,972 U.S. counties over the 50-year period from 1960 to 2009. I identify the effect of weather on monthly crime by using a semi-parametric bin estimator and controlling for county-by-month and c...

Extreme environmental phenomena such as major precipitation events manifestly exhibit spatial dependence. Max-stable processes are a class of asymptotically-justified models that are capable of representing spatial dependence among extreme values. While these models satisfy modeling requirements, they are limited in their utility because their corresponding joint likelihoods are unknown for mor...

This paper and talk will discuss the applied aspects of joint work with Mathieu Ribatet, Department of Mathematics, Université Montpellier II, and Anthony Davison, Institute of Mathematics, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The complete paper Ribatet et al. [2010] is under review. Weather data are characterized by two types of spatial effects: climate effects that occur on a regional sc...

Climate is a critical factor affecting forest ecosystems and their capacity to produce goods and services. This chapter reviews published studies of climate-forest relationships with emphasis on indications and mechanisms of change during recent decades. Effects of climate change on forests depend on ecosystem-specific factors including human activities, natural processes, and several dimension...

Psychologists have examined the many psychological barriers to both climate change belief and concern. One barrier is the belief that climate change is too uncertain, and likely to happen in distant places and times, to people unlike oneself. Related to this perceived psychological distance of climate change, studies have shown that direct experience of the effects of climate change increases c...

Evaluations of the local effects of global change are often confounded by the interactions of natural and anthropogenic factors that overshadow the effects of climate changes on ecosystems. Long-term watershed and natural elevation gradient studies at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest and in the surrounding region show surprising results demonstrating the effects of climate change on hydrol...

In order to plan strategies for adaptation to climate change, the current effects of climate on economic growth needs to be understood. This study reviews evidence of climate effects on economic growth and presents original analysis of the effect in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Case studies from the literature demonstrate that historically, climate has had significant and negative effects on house...