Climate Economics with Arvid Viaene
This podcast aims to raise the level of conversation around climate change by bringing data and economics to the forefront. As an economist, I focus on quantifying everything — from emissions and their impacts to the costs and trade-offs of climate policies. Episodes will be either expert interviews or solo explorations of key issues.
Hosted by Dr. Arvid Viaene, a climate economist with a PhD from the University of Chicago. His research on climate-related mortality has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and he has advised the European Commission on the impacts of climate policy on firm competitiveness.
Climate Economics with Arvid Viaene
#2 Dr. Ishan Nath - Trade and Adaptation in Agriculture in the Global South – Barriers and Opportunities
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Ishan Nath, assistant professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, about his research on climate change, agriculture, and trade. His forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy explores how warming could actually increase the share of workers in agriculture in many low-income countries, especially those with limited access to trade.
We discuss why trade barriers matter for climate adaptation, what makes agricultural labor patterns persistent, and how economic development intersects with environmental vulnerability.
Dr. Nath's site : https://www.ishannath.com/
His paper "Climate Change, the Food Problem, and the Challenge of Adaptation through Sectoral Reallocation" can be downloaded here:
What We Cover in This Episode:
- The research question: Can farms move toward more temperate regions as the world warms? And what does that mean for global adaptation?
- Threshold temperatures: Why extreme heat—above 29°C (~84°F)—is especially damaging for agricultural productivity.
- Why the Global South is most at risk: We explore how countries that are already hot, poor, and heavily dependent on agriculture are hit hardest by climate change.
- The “food problem”: A key concept explaining why low-income countries remain stuck with large agricultural labor forces despite low productivity.
- Trade limitations: Ishan shares findings on why poor countries import very little food—and why that severely limits their ability to adapt.
- Counterfactual simulations: What happens when trade barriers like tariffs and regulatory frictions are reduced? The results show substantial reductions in climate-related economic losses.
- Why trade matters for adaptation: The conversation highlights how better trade integration could significantly soften the blow of climate change in vulnerable regions.
- Heterogeneous climate impacts: From Northern Europe to India, we discuss how temperature changes affect countries differently, and why wealth and infrastructure matter.
- Policy implications: Beyond emissions reductions, what role should global trade policy play in climate adaptation strategies?
💡 Key Takeaway:
Climate change isn't just an environmental issue—it’s a structural development challenge. If global trade systems remain as they are, many low-income countries may be pushed further into vulnerable, low-productivity sectors like agriculture. But if trade barriers are eased, international markets could play a powerful role in helping these countries adapt.
For questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact me at arvid.viaene.ce@gmail.com
When we talk about climate policy, the focus is often on reducing emissions, but today's guest, ishan Nath, highlights another crucial dimension how we adapt to climate change, particularly in the global south. Ishan is an assistant professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and an affiliate of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. His latest research examines how climate change could reinforce existing patterns of agricultural labor and limit development, and what's striking is that, instead of moving people away from vulnerable farming regions, climate change might actually push more people into them, especially in poorer countries where trade is limited, and we'll talk about how trade policy could play a central role in helping vulnerable countries adapt more successfully to climate change. Ishan, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:I am very excited to have you on because I think you wrote one of the best papers on estimating the impacts of climate change on economic outcomes and I learned a lot from your paper, so I was very excited that you're willing to join. Would you mind maybe just describing what your paper is about?
Speaker 2:Sure Well, first I guess I'll say thanks for the kind words about the paper. You know, in economics you write like a few papers and each one takes years and years to write and there's so much time spent alone in a dark room doing analysis and writing that it's really cool when you get to this point and someone asks you about your paper and you get to talk about it to the world. So I appreciate that. What's the paper about?
Speaker 2:I think maybe the way to think about the research question is where will the world's farms be in the future as our climate changes, and how does that affect how bad the consequences of climate change are likely to be for economies throughout the world? I think there's this intuition a lot of people have that has been represented somewhat in other economics research, that perhaps if some colder places that are getting warmer are getting more suitable for agriculture, while other places that are already hot are getting too hot and much more unsuitable for agriculture, perhaps we could really benefit if the world's farms could migrate away from the hotter parts of the world towards the colder parts of the world and we could grow more food in Canada, for example, and more food in Europe, in Northern Europe and ship more food to hotter parts of the world, and that could really help us adapt to climate change. So that's kind of where I started with the research question and that led me in all sorts of directions as I tried to go about answering it, which, of course, we'll talk about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's worth mentioning, because I actually did my PhD too on this topic, but not as extensive as you did. I was just looking at the United States and I think a key feature to keep in mind is that, as you also do in the papers, these extreme hot days of temperatures above 30 degrees or like 80 Fahrenheit are really damaging for crops, and I think that's what you're saying, like, northern Europe is colder, so we can move it there as a way of adapting, which I think some of the papers were showing is hey, there's this way to adapt to climate change in this way.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's true in agriculture and it turns out to be true for a number of different outcomes that affect humans, both economic and non-economic outcomes. What's really bad it turns out when it comes to temperature and the same is also going to be true of precipitation is the extremes. If you have a day where it's 65 degrees Fahrenheit I don't actually know off the top of my head what that is in Celsius If you go from 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, sort of in the nice range of temperatures, it turns out that in the data that doesn't really seem to affect people, whether it's productivity in a factory, productivity on a farm, people's health effects that they suffer from exposure to temperature. Those things really tend to scale up when you go into the extremes.
Speaker 1:A quick note for listeners outside the United States. Ishan is using Fahrenheit when talking about temperatures. For reference, 68 degrees Fahrenheit is about 20 degrees Celsius. So the range he just mentioned roughly falls between 18 and 24 degrees Celsius. And in his paper extreme temperatures are defined as anything above 29 degrees Celsius, which is about 84 degrees Fahrenheit. So that's the threshold above which temperatures begin to negatively affect agricultural productivity. Back to Ishan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and so that's why it really matters how hot a place is in the baseline. If you're in a colder place that's experiencing climate change, then you don't have a lot of days of the year that are close to these thresholds where it starts to get too hot, so you have a lot of days where it's cold and you're getting to be less cold, which turns out to be beneficial for productivity and beneficial for people's health and things like that. I grew up in Chicago. The winters were really cold, it turns out they're really cold.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, it turns out. It's actually really good for people in many ways when winters get less cold, but the flip side of that is when summers that are already hot in places like New Delhi, where I was born, if it's 110 degrees and climate change is going to make those 110 degree days 116 degrees, that turns out to be really, really harmful for everything from crops to human health to a wide variety of other things.
Speaker 1:Exactly and then. But then the way you show it kind of in your paper is like people were saying there's substantial adaptation that can happen because of trade, which is like this 2016 paper, but then you were like building on top of it to show it's not as easily adaptable as people think.
Speaker 2:Right. So yeah, that's kind of definitely, I think, to sort of skip ahead to the bottom line of the paper. I think that you've sort of nailed it there. You have this potential intuition where perhaps, since colder places getting warmer a wide variety of evidence has shown is better for agriculture. It's going to be better for parts of Canada, parts of Northern Europe as they get warmer, because they're colder than kind of the optimal range of temperature for agriculture right now. So perhaps we can have a lot more agricultural activity in those places and reduce the amount of people working on farms in hotter parts of the world. So that's like really nice intuition.
Speaker 2:But it turns out that if you just kind of look at the pattern of where the world's farms are right now and how productive they are, then you run into some problematic facts for that narrative and it turns out that those problematic facts are going to be the core of why, unfortunately, in my paper I find it's unlikely that the world's farms are going to move away from these hotter, more vulnerable parts of the world and instead that climate change could actually perversely intensify agricultural specialization and the share of workers working on farms, especially in those places that are too hot, which are getting hotter and really harmed, and that's kind of why the paper's entitled the Food Problem, which we can talk more about.
Speaker 2:But it turns out there's special dynamics about food in the world and the way the agricultural trade currently works in the world. That suggests that actually it's really hard to achieve this story that some other research has suggested might be achievable of moving the world. That suggests that actually it's really hard to achieve this story that some other research has suggested might be achievable of moving the world's farms away from the most vulnerable locations.
Speaker 1:Exactly, you already brought up this additional food problem that's preventing some of this reallocation from happening, and what are then some of the contributions you did in your paper? So it's like this food problem showing that this is like a big impact.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so let's talk about what this food problem is and what it means for the economy working in different sectors. So first of all, I should say I did not come up with this phrase. It's something that's been around in the literature and economics. There's paper by Doug Gollin, stephen Parenti and Richard Rogerson in 2007. That is the first one I know of that kind of frames this development story as the food problem, and the story here is really trying to figure out why, as economies develop and grow richer, the share of people in agriculture declines dramatically over time. A fascinating fact is that in 1850 in the US, 60% of Americans worked on farms. In the early 1900s, it was still over 40% of Americans who worked on farms. Today it's about 1.2% of Americans who work on farms, and you see a similar pattern throughout many parts of the world.
Speaker 2:Whereas economies grow more productive and grow richer, people tend to leave farms, and so economists have been trying to figure out for a while why tend to leave farms? And so economists have been trying to figure out for a while why is that the case? And it turns out that interestingly, unlike some other things in the economy, when you get more productive at farming, that's when you have fewer farmers, because you can only eat so much food in the economy. You can have like better food and higher quality food to some degree, but you only need so much food. So when you get better at producing food, the share of people's incomes that they spend on food tends to decline, which means the share of economic activity and the share of workers in agriculture also tends to decline phenomenon in economics, where the way to have fewer farmers is to get better at farming. But now the flip side of that is if you're not very good at farming which it turns out that the low-income countries in the world are especially bad at farming then you have a lot of farmers and you have a lot of people working in the sector that you're really, really unproductive in. But that's because you need food, and so if you're unproductive at producing it, it just takes more of your labor, more of your land, more of your capital in the agricultural sector in order to meet the population's demand to eat. And so what you have right now in the world just to extend this explanation a bit what you have right now in the world is this situation where the countries that specialize really heavily in agriculture are actually relatively really unproductive at farming.
Speaker 2:And so the fact that I point to in my paper, which has been well established by other economists and literature, is that the richest countries in the world, of course they're richer because they're more productive. We think that productivity is what drives economic growth and drives income levels across countries. But the rich countries, in manufacturing, the 90th percentile richest countries in the world are about four times more productive than the 10th percentile poorest countries in the world. So the rich countries factories are four times better at producing output from a given level of labor input and capital input than the poorest countries' factories. But in agriculture the rich countries are 45 times more productive per worker 45. 45. So the gap between rich and poor countries is 10 times greater in agriculture than in manufacturing.
Speaker 2:So if the world followed kind of the simplest econ 101 international trade equilibrium is what economists would call it where you specialize in the thing you're relatively good at, then we would expect to see everybody in rich countries as a farmer and everybody in poor countries works in a factory.
Speaker 2:Because in a relative sense the rich countries are like even more awesome at farming than they are at producing things in factories, or in offices, for that matter. But the actual pattern we see in the world is the opposite. In India, something like 60% of the population works on farms, in the US it's 1%, and so we have the countries in the world that are really really unproductive at farming, are the ones where all the farmers are, and so that's kind of the fact we have to confront. If we have this hope that perhaps climate change, which is likely to make poor countries much less productive in agriculture, if we hope that it'll drive people out of farming, we have to confront this fact that they're already really really unproductive in agriculture without much global warming having happened yet, and yet the population is highly concentrated in agriculture. So that's kind of where this food problem story that I'll explain the economics of more comes in, to try to explain that existing pattern and help us think about how climate change might alter these patterns of specialization.
Speaker 1:I also have this image in my mind when I think of, like the US, you have these giant agricultural farms with these giant machines working on it like super mechanized, versus then the more substance farms like I've got my own garden, I need to do the vegetables explaining some of that 45 times more productive, because you know.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and there's a whole literature in economics that's trying to understand the technologies and policies and institutions that lead to agriculture being so much more productive in rich countries. But in this paper I'm just taking that as a given. I'm not trying to figure out why that's true. I'm just trying to figure out what we can make of that.
Speaker 1:So the story that was told before? Well, climate change will happen and they'll shift away from agriculture, but that's not the case.
Speaker 2:So, to continue down that path a little, you might expect this hopeful reallocation where people who work on farms in these places where it's getting really unproductive for agriculture as the world warms, could be able to leave their farms If you thought there was a really strong role for international trade in these places. Because if trade is playing a really strong role in these economies, then you would expect that when you get worse at producing in a certain sector, you'll tend to import more in that sector and you'll tend to export more in other sectors of the economy. That's kind of how we expect productivity to drive patterns of international trade. However, it turns out that there's basically two reasons why we think in this literature that low-income economies specialize so much in agriculture despite being relatively unproductive at farming no-transcript. And so you end up the price of food ends up being high, such that it encourages people to work in that sector, even if it's low productivity. And in places that are going to have unproductive farms, you'll have a lot of land and labor and capital devoted to agriculture just to meet the population's subsistence demands that they have to eat, and so, in the absence of trade, you would expect a lot of people to work on farms if agricultural productivity is low.
Speaker 2:Now it turns out that in the absence of trade is actually a pretty good summary of how most low-income economies work in agriculture.
Speaker 2:And so in these places, for whatever reason, which I think we don't totally understand, they trade very, very little food and especially it turns out to be difficult to import food into low-income economies.
Speaker 2:In the data, so the fact about that that I show in the paper is that in a rich country you can expect about 45% of people spending on food to be on imports. So in the richest quartile of the world nearly half of our agricultural consumption is imported from some other country in the world, but in the poorest quartile of the world the corresponding figure is 9%. So about 90% of agricultural consumption in low-income economies is produced domestically and it's because of that. In my analysis, that's kind of the fact that drives the patterns of specialization we can see in the world, which is that in the absence of trade, you need food. So a lot of your economy has to be in farming if you're not very good at farming just to produce enough food. And then it turns out that in the absence of trade is actually a pretty good summary of what's going on in the poorest quartile of the world?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's almost like you say. I hadn't quite thought about that way, but, like you, would expect them to import more food because food's relatively expensive.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and so it's a bit of a mystery or a bit of a puzzle in my paper. Why is it the case that low income countries import so little food? In the paper I basically infer that it must be really difficult for them to import food, since they're not doing it. But I don't have a good explanation for exactly why, and I think there's some potential reasons for that, like road quality, infrastructure, regulatory barriers to importing I think it can't all be explained by tariffs and trade policy, but that also probably plays a role but to explain a little more about what that means for the implications of climate change. So now you have this story where we can talk a little bit more, perhaps later about where this information comes from, but you have a story where the world's getting hotter is making it especially difficult to farm in these places. Agricultural productivity is falling much more than productivity in factories and offices in low-income countries.
Speaker 2:As the world gets hotter is what the evidence would suggest, because there's so little trade, making it harder to farm is actually going to, in my analysis, increase the share of these economies and the share of workers in the economies that work on farms, because food has these special properties where you really, really need it to survive.
Speaker 2:So if you get worse at producing food, you need more people to work on producing food.
Speaker 2:The alternative is, you could imagine a situation where people in low-income economies would import more of their food as it got harder to produce food domestically because it's getting too hot. But it turns out that what we can infer from the existing data on trade flows suggests, through the economic model, it's very unlikely that trade flows would respond very much, because there's so little trade to begin with In these places that we infer it must be the case that it's quite difficult to trade in these places. And so, in light of that, you kind of end up with a situation, in my analysis, where global warming actually leads to a greater share of workers quote unquote where then you might see, in response to warming, but also in response to just existing low productivity, that there might be greater food imports in low income economies and they might reallocate production away from farming towards places that are less vulnerable, as it turns out, to extreme temperatures places that are less vulnerable, as it turns out, to extreme temperatures.
Speaker 1:Got it To summarize the classic is you would expect them to import more food into farms to move away, but because they're getting worse at food, which is essential, they essentially now have to work more in the sector, which they're going to becoming even more unproductive in, which is not a great dynamic, because you're already 45 times less productive, now you've got to work even more in that sector.
Speaker 2:That's right and I think the way to think about it is productivity fortunately to some degree in agriculture has improved over the last several decades in low-income countries and the share of people working on farms has been falling.
Speaker 2:But I think the way to think about it is that we can expect global warming to potentially slow each of these positive developments. We can expect it to slow the rate of productivity growth and slow the rate of people leaving farms and low-income economies and kind of keep them poorer for longer. But the way out of the paper, of course, is suppose low-income economies were as integrated to trade as richer economies or suppose they were able to implement some reforms which we don't quite know because it's a macro paper. We don't quite know exactly what these reforms would look like on the ground in this paper, but something like reduced customs duties or regulatory delays to import food or lower tariffs or things like that, and they were more integrated into the world economy as richer countries are. Then you might see more of these beneficial movements in global agricultural markets that reduce their exposure to this falling productivity or this harmful productivity effects in agriculture.
Speaker 1:Because in the paper you run there's one simulation you've got several, but one is where you kind of just reduce trade barriers like tariffs, trade agreements and regulatory frictions, to just demonstrate okay, what if we take those constraints away and make it essentially easier for them to trade, like you know, because the import share is so low? Like, let's make it easier for them to trade, what did that then give in terms of results of, like mitigating these impacts of climate change?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess there's like a couple layers of how you could think about this. You could think about the sort of pie in the sky. What if four countries were just as integrated to trade as rich countries?
Speaker 2:It's not clear that's possible because there might be some things that are sort of beyond the reach of policy that make it harder to trade food in low-income countries. It could be that the productivity of how well you can produce high-quality roads and have good shipping logistics and things like that, that could be things that are difficult for policy to directly affect. So we might not want to go all the way to the situation in which poor countries are trading just as much as rich countries. We might instead want to think about an intermediate hypothetical where what if they just control the things we know they can control? They make regulations a little bit simpler, they reduce tariffs, they make it a little bit easier to trade. Just in terms of the direct costs that people face when they're become as integrated to trade as rich countries, their exposure in terms of welfare costs or the amount of money equivalent money that people are losing from the impacts of warming is about half as high if they're as open to trade as rich countries are.
Speaker 1:And then in the scenario, where Half a second, so half as high, as if there would be no adjustment.
Speaker 2:As if trade policy and trade integration were as it presently is, and so, basically, if four countries were able to have the trade integration of rich countries, my analysis suggests they could cut the cost of climate change in half, or at least the productivity costs of climate change. And then when we look at the things that we know they can control directly, like tariffs and regulatory barriers, then it goes down to cutting the costs by only about 15%, and so we think there's a lot of things that we can't quite explain about why low-income countries are not very closed off to trade or are not very open to trade, and the best guess of that is kind of this transportation infrastructure and logistics, where a lot of countries are landlocked. Port quality, road quality, things like that could be barriers that are harder to observe in the macro data.
Speaker 1:Would you like mind giving some estimates of like what the impacts are like in the agriculture and non-agricultural sector?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think my paper is not really designed to answer that question very well. I think there's some other papers that answer that better. So in this paper, the total effects on productivity in the economy so you can think of it as like roughly the effect on GDP in the worst hit countries in the world is something like 10 percent, which you know the COVID recession was about a 6 percent drop in GDP in rich countries. So you can think of like losing 10 percent of GDP every year due to being hotter as a pretty big effect. But I think actually that that likely understates the effect relative to some estimates in other papers that are more about estimating the aggregate effect rather than thinking about these dynamics of which sectors people are working in and how policy can reduce the effects, which is more the strength of the current paper that we're talking about.
Speaker 2:So in some other work I've done with co-authors Pete Cleno and Valerie Ramey from Stanford, there we're trying more to estimate the aggregate damages and a critical thing that you have to account for there is that economies grow over time and evolve over time, and so the effects of climate change.
Speaker 2:If you just imagined global warming happening in one future year, you go from a not hot world to a hot world, that might be a lot less bad than if the world is hot every year and the effects can accumulate through economic growth over time, which it turns out that a number of papers have found could be an important part of the climate change story.
Speaker 2:So when you account for this sort of dynamic accumulation of effects over time as the economy grows more slowly, rather than just being hit by a shock in one period, then we actually estimate in that paper that some of the worst hit countries are likely to suffer declines of GDP relative to a no climate change scenario of about 25 to 30%. And so in that paper we estimate what I consider to be potentially like really extreme damages on the hotter, poorer parts of the world. When you account for these sort of dynamic growth effects in this paper, it's not really designed to estimate the headline number. It's more designed to think about how can trade policy affect the headline numbers. So those are the estimates I would emphasize more.
Speaker 1:Because the one thing you did say is like those numbers are for, like the low income hot countries. Because I think one thing your paper also like mentions is there's a very strong heterogeneity in impacts. Could you like speak to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, and so you know I don't have the numbers off the top of my head from the other paper, but it's something like 8, 10, 12, 14 percent for the world on average, but it's about three times bigger than that for the world's hardest hit countries is what I find in this paper with Pete and Valerie. Yeah, of course that paper is not published yet so the results could still change. It's subject to referees. But the part about heterogeneity you make is really important. We do find in that paper that's consistent with a wide variety of literature that you know. Minnesota is kind of intuitive to you. It's actually nice for it to get a little bit warmer in like Finland or Toronto. And that's not to say that we've understood and estimated every potential effect of climate change, but at least the things that are best understood and best represented in the climate models, like changes in temperature and precipitation that's what the scientists are giving us for the most well-understood effects and the impact of those on the economy turns out to be neutral or mildly positive in some of these colder parts of the world. And I want to talk a little bit more about what drives this global heterogeneity in who is affected by climate change. What we have is kind of this really unfortunate coincidence where all of the things that make a country vulnerable to the world getting hotter and temperatures and weather becoming more extreme turn out to coincide in the same countries in the world, and so there's basically three determinants of vulnerability, and it turns out that all three of those vulnerabilities are present in the same places. So the first of these vulnerabilities that we talked about is how hot you already are. It's extreme heat and extreme exposure to weather that really matters. And so if you're India, if you're New Delhi, where you have a lot of 100 degree days, and you're making those 100 degree days 110 degree days, that's really a problem relative to if you're a temperate or a colder place and you're not approaching these extreme temperature zones, then the second determinant of vulnerability that we've discussed a lot on this podcast is whether or not you work on a farm. The empirical estimates in this paper that we're talking about today suggests that agriculture is about 10 times more vulnerable to temperature than work in factories or offices, and so we project something like a 2% global decline in non-agricultural productivity from global warming on average across the world, but in agriculture we project something like a 20% decline across a variety of different published papers in economics. And so that's the second determinant.
Speaker 2:The second determinant is whether you're in a temperate place or a hotter place or a colder place. Farming is just a lot more sensitive to temperature, for very intuitive reasons, than non-farming activities. And now the third determinant of vulnerability is whether you work in an office or a factory or a farm, and whether you live in a hot or a cold country. If you live in a place that's richer and more productive, your productivity is a lot less sensitive to weather. And so it turns out that, due to obvious technologies like air conditioning, we can really see in the data that when you experience an extreme weather shock whether it's a storm, whether it's an extremely hot day, whether it's a drought, and you're a farmer in a rich country that can irrigate, if you're in a richer part of the world, you're really much more insulated from any type of extreme weather.
Speaker 2:So we have these three determinants of vulnerability to global warming we have are you already hot?
Speaker 2:Are you a farmer or not a farmer, and are you in a richer or poorer country?
Speaker 2:And then we have this really unfortunate coincidence where the hot places are also where all the farmers work, and it's also the low-income countries, so all three determinants of what makes you vulnerable to global warming are present in the same countries. So that's why you end up with, in a lot of the economics literature on this, this really really concentrated impact on basically the hot, poor countries where a lot of people are farming, because all three of those things make you more vulnerable to global warming. And so that's kind of the challenge that we have to confront if we're going to think about how to make the effects of global warming less painful for the world's populations. I think it's really fair to think about a lot of the issue with global warming is it that even without global warming, we want people to become better off and to have higher incomes and more comfortable lives in many ways, and the greatest challenge, in my view, for global warming is interfering with that process of development and kind of keeping these parts of the world from getting richer faster.
Speaker 1:I think that was a great summary. I think like exactly with the three vulnerabilities, the concentration to bridge that I think that's what your paper shows is that one of the ways we can at least help or like mitigate the impacts is through having less trade barriers for them, which, you know, the current climate is a little bit tricky, but I think it's also good for people working in the sector to realize that making it easier for these countries to trade is one of the primary ways that you can help them deal with the impacts of climate change. So, instead of just like mitigating climate change directly through less emissions, you can help them deal with the impacts through making it easier for them to trade with the rest of the world.
Speaker 2:I think that's very much a correct reading of the bottom line of this paper, and I think you know you're also getting at a broader point, which is there's sort of two things we need to try to figure out about climate change. How can we efficiently and less painfully reduce emissions without causing too much disruption and costs to people in the economy throughout the world? That's something that economists have been studying for decades and there's thousands of papers about. But then there's a second thing, which is that we know at this point that there's going to be a substantial amount of climate change. There's already a good amount of climate change. We're continuing to emit at very high levels.
Speaker 2:Global emissions last year were the highest they've ever been. For all of the optimistic stories about emissions and all the hopeful paths to reducing them and developments in clean energy, we're still emitting a lot, and so in the best case scenario, we're going to have a substantial amount of climate change. So the other thing we need to figure out is, like you were saying, how do we make that less painful for people who are the most vulnerable to it? And I think that's the part of the economics literature that's still emerging. It's really only the last 10 or 15 years where economists have started to think about how does economic policy affect people's ability to adapt to climate change, and I think that's where my own research agenda focuses, and so naturally, I'm biased towards thinking that's where, hopefully, a lot of future work on this topic is still to come.
Speaker 1:But, like you said, I think it's a very good distinction. Exactly how can we reduce emissions most cost effective and then how can we adapt the most cost effective to the changes that are going to take place, because there are going to be some changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. That's a lot of what motivates me to do the work that I'm trying to work on.
Speaker 1:So what's next for you in research?
Speaker 2:Well, so you know, as a researcher, I think the dream is you always want to have lots and lots of projects and not enough time to work on them, and I feel very excited to be in that position, kind of at the beginning of my research career and my research journey. I think one thing I'm especially excited to work on that I'll talk about is this paper, and some of the conclusions from this paper led to a lot of other natural questions. So this paper suggests if we had a lot more trade integration in agriculture, especially in low-income economies, that maybe we could adapt better to global warming in some of the most vulnerable places. But that led people to ask me a lot of questions that I thought were good questions that I'm now trying to work on in new projects. So I have a newer project trying to look at what are the implications of integration in trade and agriculture for food security.
Speaker 2:What you're really worried about is volatility in food prices and your ability of the consumers in your country to access food in crises like when there are wars, when there are trade embargoes, also when there are weather shocks that can occur in your countries or your trade partners' countries.
Speaker 2:How do you think about how trade policy affects that and how agricultural trade integration affects that. So I have a new project about that that I'm working on with some of my friends and co-authors that hopefully we can do another podcast about someday. Another related project I'm working on is you might think, with a lot of trade integration in agriculture, that could have implications for emissions, because now if you're shipping food all around the world, of course there's emissions associated with transportation, and so we want to try to look into that and we actually think potentially there are some counterintuitive results in a project that we have there, but we're too early to really to sell results. So those are some of the follow up questions that I'm thinking about in new projects related to this much about. We know that the world is getting hotter and more disruptive in ways that really matter to the world's poorest people, and how can we make that less disruptive to the journey of development and try to help countries grow richer that are not currently, I think, meeting basic standards of human comfort?
Speaker 1:I think that was great. I maybe have one personal question for you. I've been in research myself. Was there something that surprised you during the research where you hadn't expected it, like the magnitude, or something that caught you off guard, because research has its own way of growing on you. Is there something that surprised you during this paper where you had to reconfigure your own?
Speaker 2:thinking, oh, totally. I mean, the headline results surprised me. I thought it was a paper when I started, about how we were going to move a lot of farms to Canada and that would make climate change less bad. And then I started looking at the data and realized, well, you kind of have to face this fundamental issue of why aren't the farms already all in Canada if the places that are farming are. And so basically, it's like the first month or two I was working on this project, which now is many, many years ago at the beginning of my PhD, where I went in thinking it was a project that would be pretty optimistic about adaptation and then when I started looking at the patterns in the world, it was like, well, now I have to deal with the fact that you know there's some real problems for that story. So right at the beginning it changed my own mind.
Speaker 1:Great, those are the best. Yeah, Awesome man. Then I would say thank you so much for joining me. This has been really educational for me and I think it's awesome the work that you're doing. So thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much. It's been a lot of fun to talk about the paper and thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1:That's it for this episode. Thank you very much for listening and if you enjoyed the conversation, feel free to subscribe, share it with a friend or check the show notes for more information. You can contact me on arvidviannace at gmailcom. That is also in the show notes and I will see you in another episode. Have a great day.