A Leading Expert Reflects on Climate Change and Agriculture

In my podcast series, “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program,” I’ve had the opportunity of engaging in interesting conversations over the past five years with many outstanding academic economists who have carried out work that is relevant for climate change policy.  But an important topic that has not gotten much attention in the podcast – with the exception of my recent conversation with Charles Taylor – is the impact of climate change on agriculture.

That topic is, in fact, the focus of path-breaking research by my most recent guest – Wolfram Schlenker, the Ray Goldberg Professor of the Global Food System at the Harvard Kennedy School.  You can listen to our complete conversation here.

In our conversation, Schlenker, who very recently joined the Harvard Kennedy School faculty after 19 years at Columbia, told me he that he has long been interested in empirically identifying the impact of weather and climate on agricultural yields and prices.

“When I was a grad student, there was actually a very active debate whether U.S. agriculture would benefit or be harmed from climate change. That’s how I got really interested in it, because it seemed like an unresolved issue,” he remarks. “I think one of the common things that I think I was among the first to identify, at least statistically, is this crucial role of extreme heat.”

Weather extremes, Schlenker explains, are extremely important.

“If you look at the EPA’s latest proposal for the revised social cost of carbon, and you look at all the sectoral impacts and mortality, energy consumption, labor productivity, agriculture, the common theme across all of them is that it’s pretty much all driven by how much of the temperature distribution we push into the really upper tail where the outcomes are just very negative,” he says. “I think that’s something that’s been coming back repeatedly in many contexts.”

Schlenker says that he’s excited to co-teach a new Harvard PhD-level course on environmental and climate economics with James Stock, professor in the Harvard Department of Economics, who has also been a guest in my podcast series.

“It’s based partly on the class I taught at Columbia. It’s also based on Jim Stock’s experience that he had from being on the Council of Economic Advisors in Washington, DC, where he worked a lot on biofuel standards and energy transition, and so forth,” Schlenker explains. “We’re trying to merge both the classics, the fundamentals of environmental economics, with recent policy-relevant topics.”

Wolfram also shares his thoughts on the relatively recent youth movements of climate activism, prominent both in Europe and the United States.  He says that while individual actions may not have significant impacts on specific policy initiatives, they have drawn international attention to the issue, which has been beneficial.

“They’ve been really good at setting the agenda and [putting] pressure on policymakers to take this seriously. [These actions can] lead to regulation that could help us potentially make sure we don’t use all those finite resources, and then, really have an effect on climate change,” he says.

For this and much more, please listen to my podcast conversation with Wolfram Schlenker, the 62nd episode over the past five years of the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month.  You can find a transcript of our conversation at the website of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program.  Previous episodes have featured conversations with:

“Environmental Insights” is hosted on SoundCloud, and is also available on iTunesPocket CastsSpotify, and Stitcher.

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Author: Robert Stavins

Robert N. Stavins is the A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, Director of Graduate Studies for the Doctoral Program in Public Policy and the Doctoral Program in Political Economy and Government, Co-Chair of the Harvard Business School-Kennedy School Joint Degree Programs, and Director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.