Gernot Wagner
- Senior Lecturer in Discipline of Economics in the Faculty of Business
- Economics Division
- Faculty Director, Climate Knowledge Initiative
- Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change
- Faculty Fellow
- CESifo
- Board Member
- CarbonPlan
- Columnist
- Project Syndicate
- Senior Fellow
- Jain Family Institute
- Areas of Expertise
- Business & Society, Climate, Economy & Policy, Strategy
- Contact
- Office: 392 Kravis
- Phone: (212) 8534096
- E-mail: [email protected]
* It's pronounced like "juggernaut" without the "jug."
Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, teaching, and writing focus on climate risks and climate policy.
Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written five books, including, most recently: Geoengineering: the Gamble, published by Polity (2021); Stadt, Land, Klima (“City, Country, Climate”), published, in German, by Brandstätter Verlag (2021); Climate Shock, joint with Harvard's Martin Weitzman and published by Princeton (2015), among others, a Top 15 FT McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2015, and Austria’s Natural Science Book of the Year 2017; and But will the planet notice?, published by Hill & Wang/Farrar Strauss & Giroux (2011).
Prior to joining Columbia as senior lecturer and serving as faculty director of the Climate Knowledge Initiative, Gernot taught at NYU, Harvard, and Columbia. He was the founding executive director of Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program (2016 – 2019), and served as economist at the Environmental Defense Fund (2008 – 2016), most recently as lead senior economist (2014 – 2016) and member of its Leadership Council (2015 – 2016). Before EDF, he worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Düsseldorf and New York and wrote for the Financial Times leader writer team in London. He has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute, and is a CEPR research fellow, a CESifo faculty fellow, a Faculty Affiliate at the Columbia Center for Environmental Economics and Policy, a Member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, a Coordinating Lead Author of the Austrian Panel on Climate Change, and he serves on the board of CarbonPlan.org.
Born and raised in Amstetten, Austria, Gernot graduated from high school in his hometown before moving to the U.S. for college. He holds a joint bachelor’s magna cum laude with highest honors in environmental science, public policy, and economics, and a master’s and Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard, as well as a master’s in economics from Stanford.
Gernot lives in New York City with his wife, Siri Nippita, a gynecologist at NYU Langone Health and the chief of the family planning division as well as the director of Reproductive Choice at Bellevue Hospital, and their two young children.
See my preoccupations, follow me on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn (skip Twitter, at least for now), sign up for email updates, or find me online at: Columbia Business School | Google Scholar | Leigh Speakers Bureau | Project Syndicate | New York Times | Washington Post | LinkedIn | Amazon | Bloomberg Green | CESifo and the always trustworthy Wikipedia.
- Joined CBS
- 2022
Featured Research
Climate shift uncertainty and economic damages
- Authors
- Date
- March 15, 2025
- Format
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Working Paper
Focusing on global annual averages of climatic variables, as in the standard damage function approach, can bias estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. Here we empirically estimate global and regional dose-response functions of GDP growth rates to daily mean temperature levels and combine them with regional climate projections. We disentangle how much of the missing impacts are due to differences in warming versus heterogeneous damage patterns over space and time.
Synthesis of evidence yields high social cost of carbon due to structural model variation and uncertainties
- Authors
- Date
- December 17, 2024
- Format
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Significance: Estimating the social cost of carbon (SCC)—the cost of one additional ton of CO2 emitted—is crucial for the analysis of climate change policies. Despite numerous recent studies investigating how fundamental aspects of model structure affect SCC evaluation, findings are scattered, making the relative importance of different modeling elements hard to establish. This paper synthesizes results from the published literature over the last 20 y, revealing a wide range of SCC estimates.
Updating climate beliefs based on latest IPCC report points to increased willingness to act
- Authors
- Date
- January 30, 2025
- Format
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Working Paper
We assess how changes in the scientific consensus around equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), as captured by the IPCC's Fifth (AR5) and Sixth (AR6) Assessment Reports, impact policymakers' willingness to take climate action. Taking the IPCC's reports at face value, the ECS estimates in AR6 would have lowered a policymaker's willingness to act on climate relative to AR5 due to a narrower "likely" range. However, Bayesian updating may reverse this conclusion.
Carbon Dioxide as a Risky Asset
- Authors
- Date
- May 6, 2024
- Format
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Journal Article
- Journal
- Climatic Change
We develop a financial-economic model for carbon pricing with an explicit representation of decision making under risk and uncertainty that is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. We show that risk associated with high damages in the long term leads to stringent mitigation of carbon dioxide emissions in the near term, and find that this approach provides economic support for stringent warming targets across a variety of specifications.