PNAS:气候影响与收入不平等
美国普林斯顿大学科研人员报告说，穷人承担的气候变化破坏的份额可能对气候政策具有显著的后果。综合评估模型(IAMs)估计碳排放的社会成本，并且提供了将让这些成本最小化的未来碳价格的估计。通常，这些模型仅仅纳入了在各地区之间的经济不平等，忽略了地区内部的不平等。Francis Dennig及其同事修改了一个被称为RICE的主要的综合评估模型(IAM)，通过把每个地区分解成收入五分位数，从而纳入了地区内的经济不平等。这组作者使用得到的称为NICE的模型，探索了根据气候诱导产生的破坏如何在各收入水平分布，预测的最优碳价格如何变动。现有的实验证据提示，在收入和气候变化的经济影响之间存在联系。使用这样一种情境，NICE预测最优碳价格将会比没有考虑地区内部的收入不平等的时候做出的预测价格显著更高。在更低的碳价格上，对低收入群体的破坏可能大到足以阻止他们的长期收入增长。这组作者说，这些结果提示，考虑到地区内部的收入和破坏的不平等分布，可能是规划气候政策的关键。
原文链接：
Inequality, climate impacts on the future poor, and carbon prices
原文摘要：
Integrated assessment models of climate and the economy provide estimates of the social cost of carbon and inform climate policy. We create a variant of the Regional Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (RICE)—a regionally disaggregated version of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE)—in which we introduce a more fine-grained representation of economic inequalities within the model’s regions. This allows us to model the common observation that climate change impacts are not evenly distributed within regions and that poorer people are more vulnerABLe than the rest of the population. Our results suggest that this is important to the social cost of carbon—as significant, potentially, for the optimal carbon price as the debate between Stern and Nordhaus on discounting.
doi: 10.1073/PNAS.1513967112
作者：Francis Dennig
