Venice Summer Institute 2019: Poverty, Inequality and their Associations with Disasters and Climate Change

Studying how extreme events shape the behaviour of households, individuals, and aggregate economic outcomes can provide important insights into how to cope with the effects of climate change in the future. A focus of this workshop will be the elucidation of the impact of climatic and weather factors and sudden-onset natural disasters on poverty and inequality. Furthermore, we will consider the role of public and private sector decisions, insurance and risk-transfer arrangements, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction policies. These may have effects on the distribution of income and wealth, and on poverty. In the long-run, policy decisions and distributional impacts are potentially important determinants of incurred losses. Overall, the relation of poverty and inequality to environmental hazards and changes are complex and important, and this workshop aims to motivate high-quality research on these links.

Keynote speakers:
Stefan Dercon, University of Oxford
Seema Jayachandran, Northwestern University