Risky Business
Launched in October, 2013, the Risky Business Project focuses on quantifying and publicizing the economic risks from the impacts of a changing climate.
Risky Business Project co-chairs Michael R. Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Tom Steyer tasked the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm that specializes in analyzing disruptive global trends, with an independent assessment of the economic risks posed by a changing climate in the U.S. Rhodium convened a research team co-led by climate scientist Dr. Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and economist Dr. Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley. Rhodium also partnered with Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world’s largest catastrophe-modeling company for insurance, reinsurance, and investment-management companies around the world. The team’s complete assessment, along with technical appendices, is available at Rhodium’s website, climateprospectus.rhg.com.
The Risky Business Project is a joint partnership of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Paulson Institute, and TomKat Charitable Trust. Additional support for the project has been provided by theSkoll Global Threats Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the McKnight Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation. Staff support for the Risky Business Project is provided by Next Generation, an independent 501c3 organization. tom
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http://rhg.com/people
Kate Larsen
Director
Kate Larsen is a Director at RHG and manages the firm’s work on US and global climate change issues. Previously, Kate worked at the White House Council on Environmental Quality where she was Deputy Director for Energy and Climate Change.
From 2007 to 2013, Kate worked in the Office of Climate Change at the US Department of State, serving as lead US negotiator on mitigation commitments and compliance in the UN climate negotiations. She was a primary architect of the first universal system for measurement, reporting, and verification of developed and developing country emissions and commitments under the UN, and continues to advise NASA and other organizations on greenhouse gas monitoring and accounting.
Prior to the State Department, Kate worked at the International Energy Agency in Paris, the World Resources Institute in Washington, and the Environmental Defense Fund in California. She received a Bachelor’s in Human Biology from Stanford University and a Master’s of Public Administration from the University of Texas, Austin.
REPORT
American Climate Prospectus: Economic Risks in the United States
Trevor Houser, Robert Kopp, Solomon Hsiang, Michael Delgado, Amir Jina, Kate Larsen, Michael Mastrandrea, Shashank Mohan, Robert Muir-Wood, DJ Rasmussen, James Rising, and Paul Wilson
An RHG-led team of climate scientists, economists and risk analysts assesses the economic risks of climate change in the United States by region of the county and sector of the economy for the Risky Business Project.
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Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus
Trevor Houser, Robert Kopp, Solomon Hsiang, Kate Larsen, Michael Delgado, Amir Jina, Michael Mastrandrea, Shashank Mohan, Robert Muir-Wood, DJ Rasmussen, James Rising, and Paul Wilson | August 2015An interdisciplinary RHG-led team crafts a game-changing assessment of the economic risks of climate change in the United States.
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Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions in 2012: Rhodium Group Estimates
Michael Delgado and Kate Larsen | April 21, 2015Our understanding of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in recent years has been limited by the lack of up-to-date emissions data from most countries. To fill that gap Rhodium Group has developed an internally consistent set of national GHG emission estimates for all countries in ...
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Untapped Potential: Reducing Global Methane Emissions from Oil and Natural Gas Systems
Kate Larsen, Michael Delgado, and Peter Marsters | April 20, 2015RHG analyzes current and potential future methane emissions from the oil and natural gas industry worldwide.
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Is the US on Track? EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the US 2020 Climate Goal
by John Larsen, Kate Larsen and Whitney Ketchum | October 6, 2014At the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, the United States committed to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the range of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. Halfway to that 2020 deadline, the Obama Administration has adopted or announced a number of ...
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State Contributions to Recent US Emissions Trends
Trevor Houser, Kate Larsen and Michael Delgado | October 28, 2013Recent EPA data offers a first look at how state-level greenhouse gas emissions have changed over the past few years, and who is responsible for the sharp decline in US emissions between 2010 and 2012.
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Shashank Mohan
Director
Shashank Mohan leads the development and management of RHG’s suite of economic models and other quantitative tools. He works across RHG’s practice areas to analyze the impact of policy proposals and structural developments on specific markets and broader economic trends.
Prior to RHG, Shashank worked with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the World Bank to design an electricity expansion model for Kenya and Senegal and was a program assistant at the South Asia Institute. His background is in information technology, with a previous career in software engineering at Microsoft.
Shashank holds an MPA from School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur.
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Rhodium Group » Kate Larsen
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Rhodium Group » Trevor Houser
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DJ Rasmussen | LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/**dj**-**rasmussen**-7180a86a
Greater New York City Area - PhD Student at Princeton University
View DJ Rasmussen's professional profile on LinkedIn. LinkedIn ... Ramboll Environ,;Rhodium Group (RHG),; UC Davis, Department of Civil and Environmental ...
[PDF]American Climate Prospectus
climateprospectus.org/assets/.../AmericanClimateProspectus_v1.2.pdf
2014 Rhodium Group, LLC | 5 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019. American Climate ... DJ Rasmussen is a scientific programmer with expertise in weather ...
Climate Prospectus » About
climateprospectus.org/about/
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American Climate Prospectus: Economic Risks in the United ...
https://gspp.berkeley.edu/.../american-c...
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Goldman School of Public Policy
Publications
www.djrasmussen.co/publications/
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Economic Risks of Climate Change: An American Prospectus
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=023153955X
Trevor Houser, Solomon Hsiang, Robert Kopp - 2015 - Business & Economics
D. J. Rasmussen is a scientific programmer at the Rhodium Group with expertise in weather, climate, and air pollution. Dr. Michael Mastrandrea is an assistant ...
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D.J. Rasmussen's interests lie at the intersection of Earth’s atmosphere, policy, and the economy. Mr. Rasmussen uses computational models and large data sets to study weather, climate, and air quality. After graduating from UW-Madison with a BS in atmospheric science, he was a research fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) at Princeton University. He later contributed to the physical climate projection work for the technical analysis underlying the Risky Business Project— an initiative to quantify and publicize the economic risks from the impacts of a changing climate— and was more recently a senior associate engineer at Ramboll Environ, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research/working-paper-series/american-climate-prospectus-economic-risks-in-the-united-states
Authors
- Solomon Hsiang, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley
- Robert Kopp, Rutgers University
- DJ Rasmussen, Rhodium Group
- Michael Mastrandrea, Stanford University
- Amir Jina, Columbia University
- James Rising, Columbia University
- Robert Muir-Wood, Risk Management Solutions, Inc.
- Paul Wilson, Risk Management Solutions, Inc.
- Michael Delgado, Rhodium Group
- Shashank Mohan, Rhodium Group
- Kate Larsen, Rhodium Group
- Trevor Houser, Rhodium Group
History
- Goldman School of Public Policy Working Paper (October 2014)
Abstract
The United States faces a range of economic risks from global climate change — from increased flooding and storm damage, to climate-driven changes in crop yields and labor productivity, to heat-related strains on energy and public health systems. The American Climate Prospectus (ACP) provides a groundbreaking new analysis of these and other climate risks by region of the country and sector of the economy. By linking state-of-the-art climate models with econometric research of human responses to climate variability and cutting edge private sector risk assessment tools, the ACP offers decision-makers a data driven assessment of the specific risks they face.
The ACP is the result of an independent assessment of the economic risks of climate change commissioned by the Risky Business Project. In conducting this assessment, RHG convened a research team, co-led by climate scientist Dr. Robert Kopp of Rutgers University and economist Dr. Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley, and partnered with Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world’s largest catastrophe-modeling company for insurance, reinsurance, and investment-management companies. The team’s research methodology and draft work was reviewed by an Expert Review Panel (ERP) composed of leading climate scientists and economists, acknowledged within the report.
Download Files
Download a PDF (15MB)
Technical Appendix I: Physical Climate Projections (6MB)
Technical Appendix II: Econometrics and Impacts (6MB)
Technical Appendix III: Detailed Sectoral Models (433KB)
Technical Appendix IV: Integrated Economic Analysis (512KB)
Technical Appendix V: Valuation Risk and Unequal Impacts (129KB)
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RMS:
RMS and Risky Business: Modeling Climate Change Risk
Earlier this year, RMS partnered with the Risky Business Initiative, a year-long effort co-chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Farallon Capital founder Tom Steyer to quantify and publicize the economic risks the United States faces from the impacts of a changing climate.
The report, which launched today, has been widely covered in publications ranging from Fortuneand The Wall Street Journal to The Hill. It builds on the best available scientific evidence, including both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and National Climate Assessments, to highlight the risks and cost a changing climate will bring to the business and financial communities the report addresses.
The report details the impact of climate change at the county, state, and regional level; it is the highly vulnerable coastal regions exposed to rising sea levels and the potential for changes in storm activity where RMS has been privileged to contribute our expertise and modeling.
RMS North Atlantic hurricane and storm surge models are based on a base climatology defined by the historical record of storms and represents the current state of the climate. Sea-level rise will increase the risks associated with storm surges and a changed climate may lead to changes in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes the impact the U.S. East Coast and Gulf States.
To address the potential impacts of such changes, RMS pulled together a cross-functional team from our model development group and consulting teams to implement the changes in storm frequency and sea-level rise in our model and analyze the impacts against our database of U.S. property exposure. The team worked with leading climate and hurricane experts and the Risky Business team to understand the latest scientific thinking and gather the information needed to adjust our model from the peer review literature.
In the space of just a few months, the team developed nearly 20 versions of our storm surge hazard model to reflect the expected increase in sea-level rise through the coming decades up to the year 2100, as well as the range of uncertainty captured by the latest IPCC assessment. In addition, the team developed several hundred alternative scenarios of hurricane frequency to model how hurricane frequency may evolve with different “Representative Concentration Pathways” used by the IPCC to describe possible climate futures, possible depending on how much greenhouse gas is emitted in the years to come.
The results of RMS’ analysis, quantifying the changes in losses to hurricanes and storm surges through the coming century have been fed into the Risky Business econometric modeling to quantify the cost to the U.S. economy.
Our analysis highlights that the sea-level rise alone – one of the most certain aspects of a warmer climate – has the potential to more than double the economic losses to hurricanes and storm surges by the end of the century if left unchecked.
RMS, along with Risky Business, recognizes that the analysis is not definitive; however, the potential costs can be quantified and the risks of in-action assessed. This collaboration has developed an invaluable database of information on the impacts climate change on hurricane risk, and by extension, the U.S. economy as a whole.
Just as the Risky Business Initiative hopes to promote a non-partisan discussion on the risks of climate change within the business and financial communities as a whole, RMS hopes that this work and our continued collaboration with the scientific community will lead to continued dialogue in the (re)insurance and catastrophe loss modeling community on the impact of climate change to our business.
Visit http://riskybusiness.org/ to view the full report.
Vice President, Model Development, RMS
Paul Wilson is a vice president in the RMS model development team leading the ongoing development of the RMS North Atlantic Hurricane and Storm Surge Models. Paul has a MSc. in Physics and a Ph. D. in Atmospheric Physics both from Imperial College London where his research focused on the application of extreme value statistics in the climate system and the impact of long‐ranged correlations on extreme events
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This entry was posted in Natural Catastrophe Risk, Risk Modeling, RMS and tagged catastrophe modeling,climate change, climate risk, coastal flooding, Henry Paulson, hurricane risk, Michael Bloomberg, Risky Business, Risky Business Initiative, sea-level rise, Tom Steyer on June 24, 2014 by Paul Wilson.
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muir-woods
Based in London, he has more than 20 years' experience in developing probabilistic catastrophe models and has most recently focused on the clustering of catastrophic events, insurance loss amplification, and "mega" catastrophes.
Robert was lead author on Insurance, Finance, and Climate Change for the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report, and is the author of six books, as well as numerous papers and articles in scientific and industry publications. Robert has recently focused on new models for clustering, time varying activity rates, loss amplification and Super Cats.
He is also a member of the OECD High Level Advisory Board of the International Network on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes. He holds a first class degree in natural sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences, both from Cambridge University, and was a junior research fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
- See more at: http://www.rms.com/about/leadership/executive-team#robert-muir-wood
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Solomon Hsiang
Chancellor's Associate Professor of Public Policy
Areas of Expertise
- Agriculture
- Climate Change
- Environment
- International
- Coupled Natural and Human Systems
- Political Economy
- Development Economics
- Applied Econometrics
Biography
Solomon Hsiang combines data with mathematical models to understand how society and the environment influence one another. In particular, he focuses on how policy can encourage economic development while managing global climate change, how natural disasters impact societies and the effectiveness of policy responses, and how environmental conditions influence social instability and violence.
Hsiang earned a BS in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and a BS in Urban Studies and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he received a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Applied Econometrics at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and served as a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Websites
Phone
(510) 643-5751
shsiang@berkeley.edu
Office
304 GSPP Main
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