Speaker:
DENITSA ANGELOVA, CMCC@Ca’ Foscari, RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and Venice Ca’ Foscari University

Denitsa Angelova holds a PhD in Economics at the  Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. Previously she worked as a senior researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Technical University of Munich and serves as a consultant for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences on matters regarding statistics, big data, and supercomputing applications in economics.  She has comprehensive expertise in applied economic research, conceptual and quantitative modeling.

Moderator:
FRANCESCO BOSELLO, CMCC@Ca’ Foscari, RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) and Venice Ca’ Foscari University

Graduated at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, he received a Master degree in economics from the University College of London (UK) and a Doctoral degree in economics from the University of Venice. He is presently associate professor of economics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and senior scientist at the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC) where he coordinates the Economic Analysis of Climate Impacts and Policy division. He is deputy director of the European Institute for Economics and the Environment a joint initiative between CMCC and the US Resources for the Future. Previously he has been an associate professor at the University of Milan and an affiliate scientist at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Milan. He is currently undertaking research activities in the area of climate change impact assessment and the design of optimal mitigation and adaptation strategies developing integrated assessment modelling tools and applied general equilibrium economic models.  His other research interests are more broadly related to international environmental agreements and the economics of the environment and of sustainability.

Abstract:

We propose a country-level climate risk index that is transparent, replicable, grounded on quantitative information and rigorously rooted on the IPCC AR5 climate risk definition consisting in the intersection of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. The climate risk index ranks 145 countries applying rigorous methods for normalization, weighting, and aggregation of the risk components. It was demonstrated that applying this climate risk definition, the exposure component, on its turn strictly correlated with population, dominates hazard and vulnerability (sensitivity and adaptive capacity). This result is robust to sensitivity tests on key parameters. Accordingly, countries with large populations would tend to score high in terms of climate risk, while countries with a small population would score low.