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General Interest
UA’s law, economics, and environment program tackles climate change adaptation
January 25, 2008
By Stephanie Doster
Just one year after its launch, The University of Arizona’s Program on Economics, Law, and the Environment (ELE) is taking on one of society’s most urgent issues: adaptation to climate change.
ELE, a joint research and education program between the James E. Rogers College of Law and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, will host a conference on that topic next January with the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth (ISPE) and the law school, said Kirsten Engel, ELE co-director and a law professor. The keynote speaker will be the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling.
With an emphasis on adaptation to climate change in the Southwest, the conference will examine water issues, public land management, fire danger impacts, biodiversity issues, legal and institutional policies, economic and demographic implications, and the role of evolving technology in response to climate change.
Last year, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its “Summary for Policymakers” that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that the observed increase in temperatures since the mid-twentieth century “is very likely due” to human activity. In the Southwest, the effects of climate change associated with global warming raise a suite of critical issues society must address. The projected fallout from climate change in the region includes higher temperatures; more droughts but also more floods; less snow cover, and therefore more strain on water resources; and an earlier spring with more large wildfires.
“We’re trying to bridge natural and social sciences on issues we should be preparing for. We’re bringing together what is known in these areas and thinking about what research and policy responses are needed for adequately responding,” Engel said. “So far a lot of focus has been on mitigation, which is good. But climate change is happening; there is a certain amount we can’t avoid. The conference will help make people get more serious about mitigation once they understand what we will need to do to adapt.”
While planning for the conference, ISPE faculty members Engel and Dean Lueck, ELE co-director, Bartley P. Cardon Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and professor of economics and law, have their hands full with a number of other ELE activities.
ELE supports an annual spring workshop series in which renowned scholars in economics, law, and related disciplines present original research on environmental and natural resource topics. Building on a successful series last year, ELE is hosting five workshops, beginning January 25, on subjects ranging from bird flu policy to an analysis of the Department of Energy’s voluntary greenhouse gas registry.
In addition to the spring workshop, ELE hosted the fall symposium, “Property Rights in Environmental Assets: Economic and Legal Perspectives.” The papers will be published in a special issue of the Arizona Law Review this spring.
ELE also is recruiting students for a new four-year JD/MS program in which students complete their law degree (JD) and a master’s degree (MS) with a major in agricultural and resource economics. The degree program is designed to equip students with legal skills as well as analytical and quantitative training. That knowledge is especially important in the context of climate change and the increase in pollution permits, carbon credits, private conservation policies, conservation easements, and other market activities, Lueck said.
Admission to the program requires separate applications to both the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and the College of Law. Application deadlines for fall 2008 are February 1 and February 15, respectively.
In addition to providing students with a unique program, ELE’s interdisciplinary approach focuses cohesive, analytical, and objective scholarship on important issues and policies in the environment. Combining law and economics, Lueck said, “is a natural merger.”
“The legal regulatory framework largely determines what can be done with natural resources like air, water, oil, and gas, and economics has been shown to be a powerful analytical tool to understand how firms and politicians respond to laws and evaluate the benefits and costs of policies,” Lueck said.
Engel agreed.
“Right now we have important choices facing us because of climate change,” she said. “There will be costs involved and it makes sense to examine the economics of various policy choices as we go forward.”