This paper confronts the wide political support for the 2C objective of global increase in temperature, reaffirmed in Copenhagen, with the consistent set of hypotheses on which it relies. It explains why neither an almost zero pure time preference nor concerns about catastrophic damages in case...

This paper sheds light on an implicit dimension of the climate policy debate: the extent to which supply-side response (emission-reducing energy technologies) may substitute for the transformation of consumption behavior and thus help get around the political difficulties surrounding such...

Adaptation has long been neglected in the debate and policies surrounding climate change. However, increasing awareness of climate change has led many stakeholders to look for the best way to limit its consequences and has resulted in a large number of initiatives related to adaptation,...

Assuming that capital productivity is higher in areas at risk from natural hazards (such as coastal zones or flood plains), this paper shows that rapid development in these areas -- and the resulting increase in disaster losses -- may be the consequence of a rational and well-informed trade-off...

This article investigates the use of expert-based Marginal Abatement Cost Curves (MACC) to design abatement strategies. It shows that introducing inertia, in the form of the "cost in time" of available options, changes significantly the message from MACCs. With an abatement objective in...

This paper presents a dynamic model of the reinsurance market for catastrophe risks. The model is based on the classical capacity-constraint assumption. Reinsurers choose every year the quantity of risk they cover and the level of external capital they raise to cover these risks. The model...

Green growth is about making growth processes resource-efficient, cleaner and more resilient without necessarily slowing them. This paper aims at clarifying these concepts in an analytical framework and at proposing foundations for green growth. The green growth approach proposed here is based...

Large-scale disasters regularly affect societies over the globe, causing large destruction and damage. After each of these events, media, insurance companies, and international institu-tions publish numerous assessments of the "cost of the disaster." However these assessments are based on...

This paper investigates the optimal timing of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in a multi-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sector having a limited abatement potential. It defines economic inertia as the conjunction of technical inertia -- a social planner chooses investment on...