Collaborate

One of the exciting things about working at the nexus of climate adaptation, resilience and political accountability is that there are many interesting and unanswered questions. The primary barriers to answering them are the difficulty of working with high-resolution data at scale, and the statistical training required to conduct valid inference using remotely sensed data products. These skillsets are typically orthogonal to most graduate training in economics, political science, and related disciplines and require significant time investments to acquire. The result is that those with the substantive expertise to ask and answer important questions in their fields simply find it too daunting to work with such computationally-demanding data, lack the resources to do so, or are deterred by the considerable expertise needed to address the significant and underappreciated threats to inference that emerge in these settings.

Our long-term goal is to democratize the study of climate impacts by providing guidance in these areas but also high-quality survey and climate data that has been generated with careful attention to the subtle but important issues that arise in the creation and analysis of spatially-explicit data. Through collaboration with members of Echolab and with generous funding of the King Center, we have been able to build several one-of-a-kind databases that we view as a first step in this process. The first is a climate data pipeline that is capable of calculating arbitrarily complex climate exposures for any point or polygon anywhere in the world, and to do so using not only widely-used products like ERA5 but also several new products with superior performance, particularly in the develping world. The second is a large database of geolocated and harmonized survey responses from major barometers and also other large surveys such as DHS. The third is a large, spatially-referenced database of national scale social safety net programs as well as smaller, local interventions. These interventions are likely to promote resilience but we know almost nothing about their effectiveness in doing so.

The result is that we now have the ability to estimate the effects of climate impacts on a huge range of political, economic, and public health outcomes simultaneously, and we can also compare them across both space and time in a way not possible before. We are thus in the fortunate position that our primary constraint is no longer data availability but human bandwidth — despite the importance of understanding how climate change will affect our politics, there are surprisingly few early career scholars pursuing these questions. So if you are a graduate student interested in topics at the intersection of climate change, political economy, and accountability, we’d love to hear from you! We operate on a hard-science style coauthorship model in which we provide most or all of the necessary data and graduate students lead individual projects under our direction. For students who are earlier in their graduate career and not yet ready to act as lead or co-lead author, we have several ongoing projects that we would be happy to have additional hands for. If you fall into either of those camps and want to know more, email me at the address given on my contact page and we can go from there.