Global and Climate Change Economics

The course aims to offer students an in depth overview of the main problematics related to climate change, its social-economic consequences, its potential management. More specifically, the course will introduce students to climate change as an economic problem; to the application of the different methodological approaches and tools economics uses to study and evaluate climate change impacts and policies and of their results; will present the challenges pertaining to such evaluation (presence of uncertainty, long-term time scale, large spatial scale, existence of non-market goods and services); will examine strengths and weaknesses of the different climate change policy instruments. Finally, it will provide an overview of the international climate change negotiation process.

At the end of the course students will get a comprehensive knowledge of the climate change issue; will understand trade off and complementarities across mitigation and adaptation strategies to contrast climate change; will be familiar with pros and cons of different policy instruments; will get acquainted with the major integrated assessment methodologies and results; will be up to date with the international climate change negotiation process.
This knowledge will enable student to interpret critically the results of the rapidly expanding body of economic literature assessing the effect of climate change impacts and policies, will expand students capacity to think in an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary fashion; should improve students' ability to conduct independent research in these areas.