This Summer School covers recent theories and empirical approaches of discounting future benefits and costs, with a special focus on uncertainties surrounding environmental outcomes.

How people assess environmental consequences and risks, or policy actions is a crucial question as many global environmental changes are characterized by long outcome delays. For instance, depletion of natural resources or biodiversity losses may have very severe long-term effects which will take decades to develop fully. Likewise, climate decision-making involves measuring carbon values over time, and may be sensitive to uncertain consequences.

Temporal discounting and the evaluation of environmental risks and uncertainties play a significant role in decisions and policy actions. The choice of an appropriate discount rate is however a controversial issue in the economic analysis, especially when the future consequences are associated with deep uncertainties. While the economic theoretical literature used to assume a constant discount rate, a recent literature addresses the relevant question on the appropriate value of that rate and the role of uncertainty in valuation long-term environmental issues.

During the three days of the Summer School, students will get rigorous and in-depth exposure to the most recent theories and empirical methods applied to how discounting the future. Lectures will be given by leading experts in the field:

• Aude POMMERET (Université de Savoie Mont Blanc, France Stratégie),
• Olivier CHANEL (CNRS, AMSE),
• Christian GOLLIER (Toulouse School of Economics),
• Ben GROOM 

More information here.