Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía. Edificio Los Madroños, 2ª planta (ECON-2026)

Ponente: María Dolores Gadea Rivas (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Título: Global and regional long-term climate forecasts: A heterogeneous future (trabajo conjunto con Jesús Gonzalo)

Abstract: Climate is a long-term issue; therefore, climate forecasts should be long-run. Such forecasts are crucial for designing the mitigation policies required to fulfill one of the main objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement (PCA) and design adaptation policies that mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. They also serve as an indispensable instrument to assess climate risks and successfully steer the green transition. This paper proposes a simple method to produce long-term temperature density forecasts from observational data using the realized quantile methodology introduced in Gadea and Gonzalo (JoE, 2020) where unconditional quantiles are converted into time series objects. They complement the projections obtained by physical climate models that are mainly focused on the mean temperature. These averages usually conceal wide spatial disparities which, among other distributional characteristics, are captured by our density forecast. Our proposed method consists of running an out-of-sample forecast model competition and combining the forecasts of the resulting Pareto-superior models to eliminate the forecast model dependency. Furthermore, our approach considers climate change as a non-uniform phenomenon; therefore, it is crucial to analyse it from a regional perspective offering different predictions for a heterogeneous future. The paper ends by proposing that future climate agreements and policymakers should focus on the whole temperature distribution and not only on the mean and should consider regional disparities in climate change to assess risks and design appropriate mitigation, adaptation and even compensation policies.