Study on the Functional Improvement of Economic Damage Assessment for the Integrated Assessment Model

Changxin Liu, Hailing Zhang and Zheng Wang
Additional contact information
Changxin Liu: Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Hailing Zhang: State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control (SKLESPC), and School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Zheng Wang: Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 5, 1-18

Abstract: The economic damage function of the integrated assessment model (IAM) is used to quantify the economic loss caused by climate change, and it is quite important for coupling the economic system and natural system in a model. However, there are many shortcomings of the damage function in the current IAM. The most important shortcoming is that the only climatic factor in the damage function is the global annual mean temperature rise, which would result in the estimation deviating from reality. We improved the damage function by introducing extreme climate change events. Additionally, the improved damage function is applicable to the regional characteristics by using regional climate change data. The extreme climate event information is extracted with the categories of the disasters. The damage function is set up by using the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) method based on the climate data and economic loss data. The results show that the improved IAM damage function can better reflect the actual climate change economic loss in China, making it more reasonable. This paper provides an important method and technical solution for the realization of an effective connection between the disaster damage function of the integrated assessment model and the climate elements of the Earth system model.

Keywords: integrated assessment model; damage function of climate change; precipitation; extreme climate event (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/5/1280/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/5/1280/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:5:p:1280-:d:209876

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().