CMCC Lectures
15 October 2025, 12:00 CEST
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Climate change confronts us with a future that economic actors, such as individuals, firms and institutions, cannot afford to ignore in their decision-making. At the same time, expecting their perfect foresight into future climate impacts — and the precise direction investments should take — is unrealistic. Understanding how adaptation measures influence the trajectory of future economic scenarios 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 the latest advances in modeling climate-related economic impacts and the critical role of resilience in shaping future outcomes.
As climate change intensifies, predicting how economies will evolve and transform becomes increasingly challenging. The Lecture will explore a novel approach to facing this growing complexity. Drawing on a growing body of literature that integrates climate simulations with process-based and empirical models, Prof. Sue Wing will discuss the Adaptive Rolling Intertemporal Planning (ARIP) framework. This pioneering simulation framework simulates how economies adapt over time to climate impacts by progressively updating expectations and investment decisions of economic actors in response to unexpected and foreseen climate extremes and evolving risks. Despite its complexity, the framework remains computationally efficient and provides a consistent basis for policy-relevant projections.
Join us for an insightful discussion bridging scientific progress, societal expectations, and future economic and climate scenarios.
A burgeoning literature has arisen that combines climate simulations with process and empirical modeling to construct detailed projections of future warming’s impacts on human systems. Using these results to elaborate the economic consequences of sequences of punctuated, increasingly severe impacts presents several challenges. Economic models’ dynamics range from Solow-style myopic savings/investment to Ramsey-style intertemporal consumption-investment allocation, but neither approach can fully capture impacts’ effects across fine spatial scales. Local agents aren’t entirely myopic: they anticipate future warming and undertake precautionary saving (or dis-saving)—imperfectly, and dynamically allocate investment to recover from extreme event capital stock losses. Yet spatially/sectorally/technologically detailed integrated assessment (IA) models routinely assume myopia in order to tractably simulate large arrays of heterogeneous cross-sectional adjustments. At the same time, perfect foresight is not only too stringent—it is unrealistic to assume that agents can precisely forecast the character, timing, location and severity of uncertain future warming impacts, and intertemporal simulations incorporating large amounts of cross-sectional detail over long planning horizons are computationally intractable.
This talk will critically synthesize attempts to address these challenges across the IA, spatial economic, certainty equivalent approximation, and disaster recovery modeling literatures, and introduce a new simulation framework: adaptive rolling intertemporal planning (ARIP). ARIP’s key feature is a simplified intertemporal analogue of impact-affected economies, specified over “plan” time. This computationally efficient sub-model is solved sequentially within a traditional recursive-dynamic framework, updating expectations and unexpected shocks, and corresponding intertemporally-consistent investment and migration responses, over “calendar” time. IA modeling applications and challenges specifying expectation formation will be discussed.
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.