The Economics of the Global Environment

Part I. Catastrophic risk in economic theory.- Catastrophic Risk, Rare Events, and Black Swans: Toward an Alternative Synthesis.-  Preference Representations for Catastrophic Risk Analysis.- Modeling Decisions Involving Ambiguous, Vague, or Rare Events.- Modeling Uncertainty, Context and Information Fusion via Lattice-Based Probability.- The foundations of uncertainty with black swans.- The Topology of Change.- Sustainable markets with short sales.- Part II. Ethical and welfare considerations.- Sustainable recursive social welfare functions.- Intergenerational equity, efficiency, and constructability.- Sustainable exploitation of a natural resource: a satisfying use of Chichilnisky's criterion.- The axiomatic approach to the ranking of infinite streams.- Part III. The environment in a global context.- Nested externalities and polycentric institutions: must we wait for global solutions to climate change before taking actions at other scales?.- Capital growthin a global warming model: will China and India sign a climate treaty?.- Unspoken ethical issues in the climate affair: Insights from a theoretical analysis of negotiation mandates.- Carbon leakages: a general equilibrium view.- Part IV. The case of climate change.- Chaos Control - Climate Stabilization by Closing the Global Carbon Cycle.- Climate Change and Social Choice Theory.- Discounting and the evaluation of climate policy.- Global warming and economic externalities.- Part V. Economic policy and regulation.- Detrimental externalities, pollution rights, and the "Coase theorem".- Taxes versus quantities for a stock pollutant with endogenous abatement costs and asymmetric information.- Walrasian prices in markets with tradable rights.- Part VI. Catastrophic risk in economic practice.- Exploring the role of emotions in decisions involving catastrophic risks: Lessons from a double investigation.- How the change of risk announcement on catastrophic disaster affects

Graciela Chichilnisky is the author of the carbon market of the UN Kyoto Protocol that became international law in 2005. She also created the concept of Basic Needs voted by 153 nations at the 1993 UN Earth Summit to be the cornerstone of Sustainable Development, and in 1996 created the formal theory of Sustainable Development that is used worldwide. Chichilnisky is a world renowned economist and mathematician that the Washington Post calls an "A-List Star" and appeared in the 2009 Time Magazine on "Heroes of the Environment". Chichilnisky acted as a US Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the 2007 Nobel Prize. A special adviser to several UN organizations, heads of state and US Congress, her pioneering work uses innovative market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions, conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services. Chichilnisky has a Masters and a PhD in Mathematics from MIT and UC Berkeley and a second PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley. She has taught at Harvard University, Stanford and Columbia University. Dr. Chichilnisky is a Professor of Economics and Mathematical Statistics at Columbia University, Director of Columbia Consortium for Risk Management (CCRM) (http://columbiariskmanagement.net), a former Senator and UNESCO Chair in Mathematics and Economics at Columbia University, and currently the Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Nankai University and at Beijing Normal University in China, and a Founder and Managing Director of Global Thermostat LLC (http://globalthermostat.com). Dr. Chichilnisky has authored 14 books and over 250 articles published in leading academic journals including Nature, American Economic Review, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and the Journal of Mathematical Economics, as well as popular news media outlets, such as Time Magazine and the Financial Times. She is a frequent commentator on CNN,