A Few Current Research Interests …

Sea-level rise and adaptation.

In this new work we revise the estimates of economic damages from sea-level rise, captured as the sea-level rise partial SC-CO2, and examine why the published estimates are so low. Beyond assessing the magnitude of impacts, we investigate their distribution. Conventional methods for aggregating across space and time may mask important heterogeneity, specifically in whether the costs fall disproportionately on wealthy versus poor countries, and whether they are borne by individuals or by larger governments and institutions. We find that incorporating real-world constraints on adaptation and applying alternative valuation choices such as distributional weighting each raise the sea-level rise SC-CO2 by roughly an order of magnitude. In combination, these modifications can increase it by up to two orders of magnitude. Constraining adaptation both increases the magnitude of damages and changes who bears their cost by shifting costs across categories, generally from proactive adaptation to reactive costs and residual damages.

Select related works:

  • “Revisiting the social cost of sea-level rise: who pays and how much?” (in progress, draft available upon request, with Marshall Burke and Ines Azevedo)

Chart showing social cost of CO₂ distributions for near-term discount rates of 3.0%, 2.5%, 2.0%, and 1.5%, with mean values of $80, $118, $185, and $308 per metric ton.

Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases & the Greenhouse Gas Impact Value Estimator (GIVE)

An open-source, state-of-the-art integrated assessment model incorporating updated scientific understanding throughout all components of social cost of greenhouse gas estimation in a manner fully responsive to the near-term National Academies of Sciences 2017 recommendations.

Select related works:

  • “Economic Damages from Climate Change to U.S. Populations: Integrating Evidence from Recent Studies.” (preprint)

  • “Valuing wildfire smoke-related mortality benefits from climate mitigation." PNAS (2026) (publication)

  • “Equity weighting increases the social cost of carbon.” Science (2024) (publication)

  • "The social costs of hydrofluorocarbons and the benefits from their expedited phase-down." Nature Climate Change (2024) (publication)

  • “Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO2.” Nature (2022) (publication)

  • "The social cost of carbon: advances in long-term probabilistic projections of population, GDP, emissions, and discount rates." Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2022) (publication)

  • The GIVE Model (Github repository)

Structural uncertainty and sensitivity analysis.

Exploring structural uncertainty, sensitivity analysis, and decision-making under deep uncertainty in the context of sea level rise, simple climate models, and integrated assessment models.

Select related works:

  • “Robustness to Deep Uncertainties Drives More Rapid Emissions Reductions.” (preprint, Submitted)

  • “Rapid decarbonization reduces but does not eliminate risk of extreme sea level rise due to uncertain Antarctic Ice Sheet marine instability.” Nature Climate Change (2025) (publication)

  • “Sea Level and Socioeconomic Uncertainty Drives High‐End Coastal Adaptation Costs.” Earth's Future (2022) (publication)

  • GlobalSensitivityAnalysis.jl package (Github repository) 

Schematic of an integrated assessment model showing socioeconomic, emissions, climate, damages, discounting, and social cost of carbon modules alongside representative Mimi code snippets.

Building programming tools for climate change research and policy.

Using tools from human-computer interaction and programming language design to study and build programming tools for researchers and policy-makers in the climate change domain.

Select related works:

  • Ongoing work with the PLAIT lab focused on programming tools for data science as applied to the environmental and climate change fields

  • "How domain experts use an embedded DSL." Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, OOPSLA (2023) (publication)

Mimi Integrated Assessment Modeling Framework code example showing MimiFUND and MimiFAIR climate model integration, parameter connections, and interactive regional loss charts.

Mimi.jl

Mimi is an open-source computational modeling platform used widely in climate economics research and policy-making. Written in Julia, this macro-based domain specific language streamlines modeling, collaboration, and replication while at the same time exposing the full power and performance of the Julia language.

Select related works:

  • “Mimi.jl: A Computational Modeling Platform to Support Climate Economics Research.” (working paper)

  • "MimiBRICK. jl: A Julia package for the BRICK model for sea-level change in the Mimi integrated modeling framework." Journal of Open Source Software (2022) (publication)

  • The Mimi.jl Package (homepage)