What the Future Might Hold: Distributions of Regional Sectoral Damages for the United States — Estimates and Maps in an Exhibition

Abstract

The text and associated Supplemental Materials contribute internally consistent and therefore entirely comparable regional, temporal, and sectoral risk profiles to a growing literature on regional economic vulnerability to climate change. A large collection of maps populated with graphs of Monte-Carlo simulation results support a communication device in this regard — a convenient visual that we hope will make comparative results tractable and credible and resource allocation decisions more transparent. Since responding to climate change is a risk-management problem, it is important to note that these results address both sides of the risk calculation. They characterize likelihood distributions along four alternative emissions futures (thereby reflecting the mitigation side context); and they characterize consequences along these transient trajectories (which can thereby inform planning for the iterative adaptation side). Looking across the abundance of sectors that are potentially vulnerable to some of the manifestations of climate change, the maps therefore hold the potential of providing comparative information about the magnitude, timing, and regional location of relative risks. This is exactly the information that planners who work to protect property and public welfare by allocating scarce resources across competing venues need to have at their disposal — information about relative vulnerabilities across time and space and contingent on future emissions and future mitigation. It is also the type of information that integrated assessment researchers need to calibrate and update their modeling efforts — scholars who are exemplified by Professor Nordhaus who created and exercised the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy and Regional Integrated Climate-Economy models.