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Abstract:This paper discusses the current literature on impacts and adaptation costs at the sectoral level. The focus is primarily the US, but includes examples on international applications that highlight key differences or other relevant demonstrations of method and data use. The paper provides an overall framework that addresses the components of economic impacts, including definitions of impacts, adaptation costs, and residual damages. The paper then focuses on understanding the current breadth and depth of the literature that exists to characterize what we know about economic sectors studied in the recent literature (agriculture, coastal resources, water resources, infrastructure, health, crime, energy, labor productivity, and ecosystems), how the methodologies differ, what the gaps and challenges are, and offers a sense of the impacts at the US national level. A new generation of impact studies, including the U.S. EPA's ongoing Climate Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA) project; the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 Working Group II report; the U.S. National Climate Assessment; and the Risky Business Project led by the Next Generation Foundation, provide the motivation for this review. These efforts, taken together, have advanced the state of US economic impact assessment work along two critical frontiers, both of which support benefit-cost analyses of climate change: assessment of the risk and economic consequences of extreme climatic events; and assessment of ecosystem effects. Yet, the latest work also highlights gaps in the lack of comprehensive sectoral coverage; more complete incorporation of adaptation opportunities in impact assessment; and critical cross- and multi-sectoral effects that remain poorly understood.

Understanding the impacts of climate change on economic behaviour is an important aspect of deciding when to take policy actions to prevent or mitigate its consequences. This book applies advanced new economics methodologies to assess impacts on potentially vulnerable aspects of the US economy: agriculture, timber, coastal resources, energy expenditure, fishing, outdoor recreation. It is intended to provide improved understanding of key issues raised in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. It concludes that some climate change may produce economic gains in the agriculture and forestry sectors, whereas energy, coastal structures, and water sectors may be harmed. The book will serve as an important reference for the scientific, economic, and policy community, and will also be of interest to natural resource/environmental economists as an example of economic valuation techniques. The volume will clearly be of main importance to researchers and policymakers in the US, but will also be influential as a model for assessment of impacts on economies worldwide

AbstractEconomic and health benefits assessments of air quality changes often quantify and report changes in deaths at a given point in time. The typical approach uses a method that attributes air pollution-related health impacts to a single year air quality change (or "pulse"). The perspective on benefits from these static pulse analyses can be enhanced by conducting a dynamic population assessment using life tables. Such analyses can provide a richer characterization of health risks across a population over a multiyear time horizon. In this article, we use the life table approach to quantify cumulative counts of reductions in PM-attributable deaths and life-years gained due to overlapping impacts of PM2.5 changes over a multiyear period, using case studies of air quality improvements in the USA and Chile. Our comparison of health risk and economic valuation for the two approaches shows life table analysis can be a valuable adjunct analysis to the pulse approach though both come with their own set of uncertainties and limitations. If applied jointly, they provide a broader characterization of how air quality actions can change populations in terms of life-years lost, life expectancy, and age structure. The value of these metrics is illustrated using case studies with dramatically different air quality reduction trajectories.

Abstract
The authors present a method for analyzing the economic benefits to the United States resulting from changes in drought frequency and severity due to global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. The method begins by constructing reduced-form models of the effect of drought on agriculture and reservoir recreation in the contiguous United States. These relationships are then applied to drought projections based on two climate stabilization scenarios and two twenty-first-century time periods. Drought indices are sector specific and include both the standardized precipitation index and the Palmer drought severity index. It is found that the modeled regional effects of drought on each sector are negative, almost always statistically significant, and often large in magnitude. These results confirm that drought has been an important driver of historical reductions in economic activity in these sectors. Comparing a reference climate scenario to two GHG mitigation scenarios in 2050 and 2100, the authors find that, for the agricultural sector, mitigation reduces both drought incidence and damages through its effects on temperature and precipitation, despite regional differences in the sign and magnitude of effects under certain model scenarios. The current annual damages of drought across all sectors have been estimated at $6–$8 billion (U.S. dollars), but this analysis shows that average annual benefits of GHG mitigation to the U.S. agricultural sector alone reach $980 million by 2050 and upward of $2.2 billion by 2100. Benefits to reservoir recreation depend on reservoir location and data availability. Economic benefits of GHG mitigation are highest in the southwestern United States, where drought frequency is projected to increase most dramatically in the absence of GHG mitigation policies.

AbstractCoccidioidomycosis, or valley fever, is an infectious fungal disease currently endemic to the southwestern United States. Symptoms of valley fever range in severity from flu-like illness to severe morbidity and mortality. Warming temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns may cause the area of endemicity to expand northward throughout the western United States, putting more people at risk for contracting valley fever. This may increase the health and economic burdens from this disease. We developed an approach to describe the relationship between climate conditions and valley fever incidence using historical data and generated projections of future incidence in response to both climate change and population trends using the Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA) framework developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We also developed a method to estimate economic impacts of valley fever that is based on case counts. For our 2000–15 baseline time period, we estimated annual medical costs, lost income, and economic welfare losses for valley fever in the United States were $400,000 per case, and the annual average total cost was $3.9 billion per year. For a high greenhouse gas emission scenario and accounting for population growth, we found that total annual costs for valley fever may increase up to 164% by year 2050 and up to 380% by 2090. By the end of the twenty-first century, valley fever may cost $620,000 per case and the annual average total cost may reach $18.5 billion per year. This work contributes to the broader effort to monetize climate change–attributable damages in the United States.