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Adapting to Climate Change
This paper examines the temperature-mortality relationship over the course of the twentieth-century United States both for its own interest and to identify potentially useful adaptations for coming decades. There are three primary findings. First, the mortality impact of days with mean temperature exceeding 80°F declined by 75 percent. Almost the entire decline occurred after 1960. Second, the diffusion of residential air conditioning explains essentially the entire decline in hot day–related fatalities. Third, using Dubin and McFadden’s discrete-continuous model, the present value of US consumer surplus from the introduction of residential air conditioning is estimated to be $85–$185 billion (2012 dollars).
Journal Article
Normalized US hurricane damage estimates using area of total destruction, 1900–2018
Hurricanes are the most destructive natural disasters in the United States. The record of economic damage from hurricanes shows a steep positive trend dominated by increases in wealth. It is necessary to account for temporal changes in exposed wealth, in a process called normalization, before we can compare the destructiveness of recorded damaging storms from different areas and at different times. Atmospheric models predict major hurricanes to get more intense as Earth warms, and we expect this trend to eventually emerge above the natural variability in the record of normalized damage. However, the evidence for an increasing trend in normalized damage since 1900 has been controversial. In this study, we develop a record of normalized damage since 1900 based on an equivalent area of total destruction. Here, we show that this record has an improved signal-to-noise ratio over earlier normalization schemes based on calculations of present-day economic damage. Our data reveal an emergent positive trend in damage, which we attribute to a detectable change in extreme storms due to global warming. Moreover, we show that this increasing trend in damage can also be exposed in existing normalized damage records by looking at the frequency of the largest damage events. Our record of normalized damage, framed in terms of an equivalent area of total destruction, is a more reliable measure for climate-related changes in extreme weather, and can be used for better risk assessments on hurricane disasters.
Journal Article
RAILROADS AND AMERICAN ECONOMIC GROWTH
This article examines the historical impact of railroads on the U.S. economy, with a focus on quantifying the aggregate impact on the agricultural sector in 1890. Expansion of the railroad network may have affected all counties directly or indirectly—an econometric challenge that arises in many empirical settings. However, the total impact on each county is captured by changes in that county’s “market access,” a reduced-form expression derived from general equilibrium trade theory. We measure counties’ market access by constructing a network database of railroads and waterways and calculating lowest-cost county-to-county freight routes. We estimate that county agricultural land values increased substantially with increases in county market access, as the railroad network expanded from 1870 to 1890. Removing all railroads in 1890 is estimated to decrease the total value of U.S. agricultural land by 60%, with limited potential for mitigating these losses through feasible extensions to the canal network or improvements to country roads.
Journal Article
The Historically Evolving Impact of the Ogallala Aquifer: Agricultural Adaptation to Groundwater and Drought
Agriculture on the American Plains has been constrained historically by water scarcity. Post-WWII technologies enabled farmers over the Ogallala aquifer to extract groundwater for large-scale irrigation.Comparing counties over the Ogallala with nearby similar counties, groundwater access increased agricultural land values and initially reduced the impact of droughts. Over time, land use adjusted toward water intensive crops and drought sensitivity increased. Viewed differently, farmers in nearby water-scarce areas maintained lowervalue drought-resistant practices that fully mitigate naturally higher drought sensitivity. The evolving impact of the Ogallala illustrates the importance of water for agricultural production, but also the large scope for agricultural adaptation to groundwater and drought.
Journal Article
Global rainfall erosivity assessment based on high-temporal resolution rainfall records
The exposure of the Earth’s surface to the energetic input of rainfall is one of the key factors controlling water erosion. While water erosion is identified as the most serious cause of soil degradation globally, global patterns of rainfall erosivity remain poorly quantified and estimates are typically associated with large uncertainties. This hampers the implementation of effective soil degradation mitigation and restoration strategies. Quantifying rainfall erosivity is challenging as it requires high temporal resolution (<30min) and high fidelity rainfall recordings over long periods of time (>10 years). Here, we present the results of an extensive global data collection effort whereby we estimated rainfall erosivity for 3,625 stations covering 63 countries. This first ever Global Rainfall Erosivity Database was used to develop a global erosivity map at 30 arc-seconds (~1 km) based on a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Globally, the mean rainfall erosivity was estimated to be 2,190 MJ mm ha-1 h-1 yr-1, with the highest values (>5,200 MJ mm ha-1 h-1 yr-1) in major parts of South America and the Caribbean countries, Central east Africa and South east Asia. The lowest values (< 200 MJ mm ha-1 h-1 yr-1) are mainly found in Canada, the Russian Federation, Northern Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East. The tropical climate zone has by far the highest mean rainfall erosivity (7,104 MJ mm ha-1 h-1 yr-1) followed by the temperate (3,729 MJ mm ha-1 h-1 yr-1), whereas the lowest mean (493 MJ mm ha-1 h-1 yr-1) was estimated in the cold climate zone.
Publication
Convergence in Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from High Temperatures and Mortality, 1900-2004
This paper combines panel data on monthly mortality rates of US states and daily temperature variables for over a century (1900-2004) to explore the regional evolution of the temperature-mortality relationship and documents two key findings. First, the impact of extreme heat on mortality is notably smaller in states that more frequently experience extreme heat. Second, the difference in the heat-mortality relationship between hot and cold states declined over 1900-2004, though it persisted through 2004. Continuing differences in the mortality consequences of hot days suggests that health motivated adaptation to climate change may be slow and costly around the world.
Journal Article
Urban parks and urban problems
Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Contemporary planning interventions promise salvation via spatial fixes that might reduce carbon emissions, boost metropolitan economies, and allow urban society to thrive in spite of rising seas and climate disasters. New wetlands, floodgates, and other adaptive infrastructures allow water to coexist with urban space; new parks, such as New York’s High Line and Chicago’s 606, celebrate the interweaving of built and natural environments and suggest how outmoded infrastructure can be repurposed for civic benefit. While the climate dilemmas at hand are historically new, the use of landscaped environments in the service of solving social problems is not. Dating to the first generation of urban park development in the 19th century, planners have deployed green spaces as solutions to various cultural, political, and economic conundrums of the city. Offering an historical parallel and counterweight to investigations of contemporary urban–environmental dynamics, this paper investigates the period of park development that occurred in the 19th century in North America and Europe, using Chicago’s Olmsted-designed South Park (the contemporary Washington and Jackson Parks) as a case study. I argue that green spaces’ distinct nexus of (1) normative cultural meanings around nature, (2) power relations bound up in dominant landscape aesthetics, and (3) direct link to the economic realm via the structuring of land values have made green space development a powerful ‘cultural fix’: a means of using social space to mitigate perceived social crises. Understanding the historical foundations of green spaces’ use as cultural fixes can inform contemporary analyses, particularly as new landscape ideologies emerge as part of broader green urbanism development and climate change adaptation strategies.
为什么每个人都认为城市可以拯救地球？当代的规划干预措施通过空间修复来承诺拯救，这些修复可能会减少碳排放，推动大都市经济，并允许城市社会蓬勃发展，尽管海平面上升和气候灾难日益严重。新的湿地、洪水闸门和其他适应性基础设施使水能够与城市空间共存；纽约High Line和芝加哥606等新公园实现了建筑环境和自然环境的交融，并说明老旧的基础设施可以怎样为公民利益重新发挥作用。 虽然目前的气候困境是有史以来前所未有的，但在解决社会问题的过程中使用景观环境并不是什么新鲜事。早在十九世纪第一代城市公园建设过程中，规划者们已将绿色空间的部署视为各种城市文化、政治和经济难题的解决方案。本文在当代城市环境动态进行研究中引入类似的历史事件作为平衡因素。作者探讨了19世纪发生在北美和欧洲的公园建设时期，并采用奥姆斯特德设计的芝加哥南方公园（相当于当代的华盛顿公园和杰克逊公园） 作为案例研究。笔者认为，绿色空间的独特之处在于：（1）围绕自然的规范性文化含义，（2）与主导景观美学紧密相连的权力关系，以及（3）通过土地价值的结构与经济领域的直接联系。这些独特之处使得绿色空间的开发成为了一种强大的“文化修复”：一种利用社会空间来减轻对社会危机的感知的手段。 了解绿色空间作为文化修复的历史基础可以为当代分析提供启示，特别是考虑到，新的景观意识形态是作为更广泛的“绿色城市化发展”和“气候变化适应战略”的一部分涌现的。
Journal Article
AGRICULTURAL RISK AND THE SPREAD OF RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES
Building on the idea that members of religious communities insure each other against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious communities should be more widespread where populations face greater common risk. Our theoretical argument builds on idiosyncratic and common risks aggravating each other. When this is the case, individuals have a greater incentive to mutually insure against idiosyncratic risk when greater common risk makes the worst case scenario of bad realizations of common and idiosyncratic risks more likely. Our empirical analysis exploits common rainfall risk as a source of common county-level agricultural risk in the 19th-century United States. We find that a greater share of the population was organized in religious communities in counties with greater common agricultural risk, holding expected agricultural output constant. The link between rainfall risk and membership in religious communities is stronger among more agricultural counties and counties exposed to greater rainfall risk during the growing season. We also find that among the historically more agricultural counties, more than 1/3 of 19th-century differences in religious membership associated with rainfall risk persist to the turn of the 21st century.
Journal Article