An economic model to help policymakers understand willingness to deal with climate change efforts | Bob Yirka

Created by : Francis Goodwin View profile

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Sept. 27, 2018 (Phys.org) -- Two economists -- one with the London School of Economics and Political Science, the other with Princeton University -- have created a model to assist policymakers in better understanding willingness issues related to climate change mitigation efforts.

In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Timothy Besley and Avinash Dixit describe how their model works and the ways it could be used.

Besley and Dixit suggest the reason the world has not responded in a serious way to the threat of climate change is because there is no way those in charge can properly assess when and where catastrophic events due to climate change will occur.

They believe that policymakers require a means for assessing the willingness to pay for carbon emission reductions based on the odds of catastrophic events occurring in a given time frame.

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