CMCC Lectures
15 October 2025, 12:00 CEST
To join the Lecture, register here
Climate change confronts us with a future that households, firms and institutions cannot afford to ignore in their decision-making. At the same time, expecting these actors to perfectly foresee future climate impacts, related extreme events, and precautionary investments to optimally adjust to them, is unrealistic. Understanding how impacts and adaptation measures might jointly influence the future trajectory of economies is crucial for science-based decision-making: in this upcoming CMCC Lecture, Ian Sue Wing — a leading authority in environmental policy, professor at Boston University, and newly appointed CMCC Bassi Fellow — will present advances in economic modeling of climate-related impacts and the critical role of resilience in shaping future outcomes.
Impacts of climate change are now routinely being projected at the scale of subnational regions. The challenge is to better understand the implications for the future trajectories of regional economies, especially as they adjust to shocks that are both uncertain and punctuated in space and time. The Lecture will explore a novel approach to addressing this challenge. Drawing on a burgeoning literature that integrates fine spatial scale climate projections with process-based, empirical, and economic simulation models, Prof. Sue Wing will discuss the Adaptive Rolling Intertemporal Planning (ARIP) framework. ARIP simulates how economies adapt over time to climate impacts by progressively updating actors’ static substitution and dynamic investment behavior in response to ex-post recovery from unanticipated shocks as well as ex-ante expectations of future impacts. The ambition is to provide a rigorous, computationally tractable environment for investigating the regional economic consequences of impacts and policy-relevant adaptation interventions, and catalyzing advances in interdisciplinary climate research.
Join us for an insightful discussion bridging scientific progress, societal expectations, and future economic and climate scenarios.
Speaker: Ian Sue Wing, Dept. of Earth & Environment Boston University
Moderator: Enrica De Cian, CMCC
Ian Sue Wing is Professor in the Department of Earth & Environment at Boston University. He conducts research and teaching on the economic analysis of energy and environmental policy, with an emphasis on climate change and computational general equilibrium (CGE) analysis of economic adjustment to policy and natural environmental shocks. His current research focuses on characterizing the broader economic consequences of climate change impacts in a variety of areas (energy systems, agriculture and forestry, and human health), assessing the implications for society’s capacity to mitigate future emissions of greenhouse gases, and simulating the regional economic impacts of natural disasters. Much of this work involves articulating the structural linkages between CGE models and econometric models of climate impacts, or bottom-up science- or engineering-based process simulations of energy systems, agro-ecosystems, and natural hazards. He has been supported by grants from the California Energy Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Foundation. He has been a member of advisory and review panels for the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Research Council and NSF, and served as a contributing author to the IPCC AR5 and the Third National Climate Assessment.
The event is part of the CMCC Lectures webinar series, which presents frontier topics and solutions in climate sciences and action, through the insights of leading experts. The series provides a platform for distinguished scientists to showcase their cutting-edge research and engage in dialogue with peers and stakeholders.