Publications

Climate change impacts threaten the stability of the US housing market. In response to growing concerns that increasing costs of flooding are not fully captured in property values, we quantify the magnitude of unpriced flood risk in the housing market by comparing the empirical and economically efficient prices for properties at risk. We find that residential properties exposed to flood risk are overvalued by US$121–US$237 billion, depending on the discount rate. In general, highly overvalued properties are concentrated in counties along the coast with no flood risk disclosure laws and where there is less concern about climate change. Low-income households are at greater risk of losing home equity from price deflation, and municipalities that are heavily reliant on property taxes for revenue are vulnerable to budgetary shortfalls. The consequences of these financial risks will depend on policy choices that influence who bears the costs of climate change.

Biodiversity in ecosystems plays an important role in supporting human welfare, including regulating the transmission of infectious diseases. Many of these services are not fully-appreciated due to complex environmental dynamics and lack of baseline data. Multicontinental amphibian decline due to the fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) provides a stark example. Even though amphibians are known to affect natural food webs—including mosquitoes that transmit human diseases—the human health impacts connected to their massive decline have received little attention. Here we leverage a unique ensemble of ecological surveys, satellite data, and newly digitized public health records to show an empirical link between a wave of Bd-driven collapse of amphibians in Costa Rica and Panama and increased human malaria incidence. Subsequent to the estimated date of Bd-driven amphibian decline in each ‘county’ (canton or distrito), we find that malaria cases are significantly elevated for several years. For the six year peak of the estimated effect, the annual expected county-level increase in malaria ranges from 0.76 to 1.1 additional cases per 1000 population. This is a substantial increase given that cases country-wide per 1000 population peaked during the timeframe of our study at approximately 1.5 for Costa Rica and 1.1 for Panama. This previously unidentified impact of biodiversity loss illustrates the often hidden human welfare costs of conservation failures. These findings also show the importance of mitigating international trade-driven spread of similar emergent pathogens like Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans.

Pollution from wildfires constitutes a growing source of poor air quality globally. To protect health, governments largely rely on citizens to limit their own wildfire smoke exposures, but the effectiveness of this strategy is hard to observe. Using data from private pollution sensors, cell phones, social media posts, and internet search activity, we find that, during large wildfire smoke events, individuals in wealthy locations increasingly search for information about air quality and health protection, stay at home more, and are unhappier. Residents of lower income neighborhoods exhibit similar patterns in searches for air quality information but not for health protection, spend less time at home, and have more muted sentiment responses. During smoke events, indoor PM2.5 concentrations often remain 3-4x above health-based guidelines and vary by 20x between neighboring households. Our results suggest that policy reliance on self-protection to mitigate smoke health risks will have modest and unequal benefits.

Water leaks management as an efficient urban water saving tool.

We highlight mobility inequalities during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Biological invasions entail massive biodiversity losses and tremendous economic impacts that justify significant management efforts. Because the funds available to control biological invasions are limited, there is a need to identify priority species. In this paper, we first review current invasive species prioritization methods and explicitly highlight their strengths and pitfalls. We then construct a cost–benefit optimization framework that offers the theoretical foundations of a simple method for the management of multiple invasive species under a limited budget. We provide an algorithm to operationalize this framework and render explicit the assumptions required to satisfy the management objective.