Climate change disproportionately affects people living in poverty and threatens to reverse decades of progress in global poverty alleviation. Many of these consequences are felt already through worsening food security and extreme weather events that damage economies and displaced populations. To date, much investment has focused on technological innovations to combat climate change. However, there is less evidence on policy innovation, which is equally important. While the climate sphere is rich with data and evidence about the likely impacts of climate change on our planet and societies, in many cases, there is not yet rigorous evidence on the benefits and costs of programs and policies from real-world evaluations.
To further support the important work to build climate resiliency and a sustainable environment, J-PAL Southeast Asia (SEA) will host this in-person research-to-policy conference, Emerging Challenges in the Environment Landscape: Addressing Climate Change, Sustainability, and Poverty. The goal of this conference is to provide insights into the Government of Indonesia’s policy priorities, identify critical policy questions, and learn from global evidence about challenges faced in the environmental sector.
There will be two parts to the conference. We will kick off the day with a plenary session, where speakers will discuss examples from existing evidence on how innovative environmental economics research contributed to informing key policies.
This will be followed by three parallel workshop sessions, where speakers and participants will have the opportunity to discuss a series of open questions and dive deeper into specific environment- and climate change-related issues.
Participants are welcome to join one of the following parallel workshop sessions:
Sudarno Sumarto
Policy Advisor for the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K); Senior Research Fellow, The SMERU Institute
Ryan Edwards
J-PAL Affiliated Professor; Deputy Director and a Senior Policy Fellow at the Development Policy Centre, Australia National University
Namrata Kala
J-PAL Affiliated Professor; W.Maurice Young (1961) Career Development Professor of Management and Assistant Professor in Applied Economics at MIT Sloan School of Management
Robin Burgess
J-PAL Affiliated Professor; Professor of Economics, London School of Economics
Budy Resosudarmo
J-PAL Invited Researcher; Professor at the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics at Australia National University
Rema Hanna (welcoming remarks)
Scientific Director of J-PAL SEA; Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies at Harvard Kennedy School
Benjamin Olken (welcoming remarks)
Scientific Director of J-PAL SEA; Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Additional speakers forthcoming