Environmental Justice & Economics

This course is divided in two main parts. The first part studies selected environmental justice concerns and potential solutions to address these inequalities in policy practice. We begin by examining the environmental justice implications of climate change, as well as the historical and institutional foundations of the environmental justice movement. We will then dive deeper into the politics and policies of environmental justice via case studies, among others on energy access, the governance of emissions offsets, and the distributional effects of some main environmental policies. The second part of the course explores the emerging empirical literature on measuring and addressing environmental justice concerns in economics. We will discuss the origins of disproportionate exposure to pollution and environmental hazards across different population groups, and how to measure them. We will also analyse the mechanisms through which disproportionate exposure arises, with a particular emphasis on residential sorting, property rights and the political process.