Time: 2023/04/12 (Wed.), 9:00 -10:30 am (Beijing Time)

Title:  Rain follows the forest: Land use policy, climate change, and adaptation

About the speaker:

Charles Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School (incoming). His research interests are in environmental economics with a focus on climate change, agriculture, land use, and ecosystem services. He often uses satellite data and remote sensing to help answer policy questions. Prior to academia, he held positions at The Earth Partners LP, a sustainable land investment company, McKinsey & Company, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is the co-founder of Drylands Natural Resource Centre. He received a PhD in Sustainable Development from Columbia University in 2022 and was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

Abstract:

Human actions can alter the local and regional climate, particularly via land use. We assess the impact of the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a large-scale forestation program in the 1930s which planted 220 million trees across six US Midwestern states. The program led to a regional increase in precipitation and decrease in temperature, with impacts persisting for several decades. The change in climate extended to adjacent unforested land up to 200km away—enabling us to directly study climate adaptation. In places facing more favorable growing conditions, crop yields increased significantly. Adaptation accounts for up to half of the yield increase, with farmers switching to more water-intensive production. This paper highlights the endogeneity risk in using spatial variation in climate trends in estimating climate damages, as well as the potential for tree planting to mitigate climate change impacts.