Equity weighting increases the social cost of carbon.

New government guidelines could transform benefit-cost analysis of US climate policy.

Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO.

The social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO) measures the monetized value of the damages to society caused by an incremental metric tonne of CO emissions and is a key metric informing climate policy. Used by governments and other decision-makers in benefit-cost analysis for over a decade, SC-CO estimates draw on climate science, economics, demography and other disciplines. However, a 2017 report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) highlighted that current SC-CO estimates no longer reflect the latest research.

Estimates of country level temperature-related mortality damage functions.

Many studies project that climate change is expected to cause a significant number of excess deaths. Yet, in integrated assessment models that determine the social cost of carbon (SCC), human mortality impacts do not reflect the latest scientific understanding. We address this issue by estimating country-level mortality damage functions for temperature-related mortality with global spatial coverage.

Utilitarian benchmarks for emissions and pledges promote equity, climate and development.

Tools are needed to benchmark carbon emissions and pledges against criteria of equity and fairness. However, standard economic approaches, which use a transparent optimization framework, ignore equity. Models that do include equity benchmarks exist, but often use opaque methodologies.

Health Impacts of Climate Change as Contained in Economic Models Estimating the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide.

The health impacts of climate change are substantial and represent a primary motivating factor to mitigate climate change. However, the health impacts in economic models that estimate the social cost of carbon dioxide (SC-CO) have generally been made in isolation from health experts and have never been rigorously evaluated. Version 3.

Equity is more important for the social cost of methane than climate uncertainty.

The social cost of methane (SC-CH) measures the economic loss of welfare caused by emitting one tonne of methane into the atmosphere. This valuation may in turn be used in cost-benefit analyses or to inform climate policies. However, current SC-CH estimates have not included key scientific findings and observational constraints.

Mimi-PAGE, an open-source implementation of the PAGE09 integrated assessment model.

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have become critical tools for assessing the costs and benefits of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Three models currently inform the social cost of carbon dioxide (SCCO, the net present value of damages from one additional ton of CO) used by the US federal government, several states, and Canada. Here we present a new open-source implementation of one of these models (PAGE09) in the Julia programming language using a modular modeling framework (Mimi).