#2 Dr. Ishan Nath - Trade and Adaptation in Agriculture in the Global South – Barriers and Opportunities
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Ishan Nath, assistant professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, about his research on climate change, agriculture, and trade. His forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy explores how warming could actually increase the share of workers in agriculture in many low-income countries, especially those with limited access to trade. The transcript follows below after the summary.
We discuss why trade barriers matter for climate adaptation, what makes agricultural labor patterns persistent, and how economic development intersects with environmental vulnerability.
Dr. Nath's site: https://www.ishannath.com/
His paper "Climate Change, the Food Problem, and the Challenge of Adaptation through Sectoral Reallocation" can be downloaded here:
What We Cover in This Episode:
The research question: Can farms move toward more temperate regions as the world warms? And what does that mean for global adaptation?
Threshold temperatures: Why extreme heat—above 29°C (~84°F)—is especially damaging for agricultural productivity.
Why the Global South is most at risk: We explore how countries that are already hot, poor, and heavily dependent on agriculture are hit hardest by climate change.
The “food problem”: A key concept explaining why low-income countries remain stuck with large agricultural labor forces despite low productivity.
Trade limitations: Ishan shares findings on why poor countries import very little food—and why that severely limits their ability to adapt.
Counterfactual simulations: What happens when trade barriers like tariffs and regulatory frictions are reduced? The results show substantial reductions in climate-related economic losses.
Why trade matters for adaptation: The conversation highlights how better trade integration could significantly soften the blow of climate change in vulnerable regions.
Heterogeneous climate impacts: From Northern Europe to India, we discuss how temperature changes affect countries differently, and why wealth and infrastructure matter.
Policy implications: Beyond emissions reductions, what role should global trade policy play in climate adaptation strategies?
💡 Key Takeaway:
Climate change isn't just an environmental issue—it’s a structural development challenge. If global trade systems remain as they are, many low-income countries may be pushed further into vulnerable, low-productivity sectors like agriculture. But if trade barriers are eased, international markets could play a powerful role in helping these countries adapt.
For questions, comments or suggestions, you can contact me at arvid.viaene.ce@gmail.com
Introduction
Arvid Viaene: Hello, and today I'm welcoming Ishan Nath Nath to the podcast. Ishan Nath is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an affiliate of the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard. He studies topics related to climate change, international trade, economic growth and development. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2019. That's also where we met in University of Chicago. And before going to Harvard, he was an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and did a year as a postdoctoral f ellow in the international economics section at Princeton. So, Ishan Nath, welcome to the podcast.
Ishan Nath: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Arvid Viaene: I am very excited to have you on because I think you wrote one of the best papers on estimating the impacts of climate change on economic outcomes. And I learned a lot from your paper, so I was very excited that you're willing to join. And I think your paper can also help listeners in two ways. First is to help listeners to think more clearly about the impacts of climate change. But second, also to give them some empirical estimates on the possible damages from climate change. I'm going to read the title of your paper, and then I'll just ask you what what it is about. So the title is “Climate Change, the Food Problem and the Challenge of Adaptation through Reallocation”. And it's going to be published in the Journal of Political Economy, which is awesome, which is one of the top economic papers. So would you mind me just describing what your paper is about?
Ishan Nath: Sure, Well, first, I guess I'll say thanks for the kind words about the paper, you know, in economics, you write like a few papers and each one takes years and years to write. And there's so much time spent alone in a dark room doing analysis and writing that it's really cool when you get to this point and someone asks you about your paper and you get to talk about it to the world. So I appreciate that.
Research Question: Where will the world's farms be in the future as our climate changes
What's the paper about? I think maybe the way to think about the research question is where will the world's farms be in the future as our climate changes? And how does that affect how bad the consequences of climate change are likely to be for economies throughout the world?
I think there is this intuition a lot of people have that has been presented somewhat in in other economics research that perhaps some colder places that are getting warmer are getting more suitable for agriculture. While other places that are already hot are getting too hot and are becoming much more unsuitable for agriculture. So perhaps we could really benefit if the world's farms could migrate away from the hotter parts of the world towards the colder parts of the world. So we could grow more food in Canada, for example, and more food and in Europe, in Northern Europe, and ship more food to hotter parts of the world, and that could really help us adapt to climate change.
So that's kind of where I started with the research question. And that led me in all sorts of directions as I as i tried to go about answering it, which, of course, we'll talk about.
Arvid Viaene: Yeah, and I think it's worth mentioning because is exactly that because I actually did my PhD too on of this this topic, but not as as extensive as you did. I was just looking at the United States and I think a key feature to keep in mind is that as you also do in the papers, these the extreme hot days of temperatures above 30 degrees or 80 Fahrenheit are really damaging for crops.
And I think that's what you're saying. Like Northern Europe is colder, so we can move it there as as a way of adapting, which I think was one of some of the papers we're showing is, hey, there's this way to adapt to climate change in this way.
It are the extreme temperatures that are going to cause climate damages
Ishan Nath: That's right. That's true in agriculture. And it turns out to be true for a number of different outcomes that affect humans, both economic and non-economic outcomes. What's really bad, it turns out, when it comes to temperature, and the same is also going to be true of precipitation, is the extremes. If you have a day where it's 65 degrees Fahrenheit, I don't actually know off the head what that is in Celsius. If you go from 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, sort of in the nice range of temperatures, it turns out that in the data, that doesn't really seem to affect people, whether it's productivity in a factory, productivity on a farm, or people's health. The effects that they suffer from [climate cange] from exposure to temperature tend to scale up when you go into the extremes of temperature.
Arvid Viaene: Yeah, so I'll just say like 65 to 70 Fahrenheit is around like 18-19 Celsius to 25 Celcius, so it goes from like warm to still being warm but not extremely so.
Ishan Nath: Yeah, exactly. And so that's why it really matters how hot a place is in the baseline. If you're in a colder place that's experiencing climate change, then you don't have a lot of days of the year that are close to these thresholds where it starts to get too hot. You have a lot of days where it's cold and its getting to be less cold, which turns out to be beneficial for productivity and beneficial for people's health and things like that. I grew up in Chicago, and the winters were really cold.
Arvid Viaene: Yeah, they're really cold.
Ishan Nath: It turns out it is actually good for people in many ways when winters get less cold. But the flip side of that is when summers that are already hot in places like New Delhi, where I was born. If it's 110 degrees and climate change is going to make those 110 degree days 116 degrees, that turns out to be really, really harmful for everything from crops to human health to a a wide variety of other things.
Climate change can intensify agricultural specialization instead of decrease it
Arvid Viaene: Exactly. And then the way you show it kind of in your paper is people were saying that there is substantial adaptation that can happen because of trade, which is like this 2016 paper. But then you were like building on top of it to show it's not as easily adaptable as people think.
Ishan Nath: Right. So, yeah, that's kind of definitely, I think, to sort of skip ahead to the bottom line of the paper, I think that you've sort of nailed it there. You have this potential intuition where perhaps since colder places getting warmer, a wide variety of evidence has shown is better for agriculture.
It's going to be better for parts of Canada, for parts of northern Europe as they get warmer because they're colder than kind of the optimal range of temperature for agriculture right now. So perhaps we can have a lot more agricultural activity in those places and reduce the amount of people working on farms in hotter parts of the world.
So that's like really nice intuition, but it turns out that if you just kind of look at the pattern of where the world's farms are right now and how productive they are, then you run into some problematic facts for that narrative. And it turns out that those problematic facts are going to be the core of why, unfortunately, in my paper, I find that it's unlikely that the world's farms are going to move away from these hotter, more vulnerable parts of the world.
And instead, that climate change could actually perversely intensify agricultural specialization and the share of workers working on farms, especially in those places that are too hot, that which are getting hotter and really harmed.
And that's kind of why the paper's entitled The Food Problem, which we can talk more about. But it turns out there are special dynamics about food in the world and the way that agricultural trade currently works in the world that suggests that actually it's really hard to achieve this story that some other research has suggested might be achievable of moving the world's farms away from the most vulnerable locations.
Arvid Viaene: Exactly. You already brought up this additional food problem that's preventing some of this reallocation from happening. And what are then some of the contributions you made in your paper? So it is this food problem showing that this has a big impact.
Ishan Nath: So, yeah, so let's talk about what this food problem is and what it means for share the economy working in different sectors. So first of all, I should say I did not come up with this phrase. It's something that's been around in the literature and economics. There is a paper by Doug Gollins, Stephen Parenti and Richard Rodgersson in 2007 that is the first one I know of that that kind of frames this development story as the food problem.
And the story here is really trying to figure out why, as economies develop and grow richer, the share of people in agriculture declines dramatically over time. A fascinating fact is that in 1850 in the US, 60% of Americans worked on farms. In the early nineteen hundreds it was still over 40% of Americans who worked on farms. Today, it's about 1.2% Americans who work on farms. And you see a similar pattern throughout many parts of the world, where as economies grow more productive and grow richer, people tend to leave farms.
And so economists have been trying to figure out for a while, why is that the case? And it turns out that interestingly, unlike some other things in the economy, when you get more productive at farming, that's when you have fewer farmers, because you can only eat so much food in the economy. You can have better food and higher quality food to some degree, but you only need so much food. So when you get better at producing food, the share of people's incomes that they spend on food tends to decline, which means the share of economic activity and the share of workers and agriculture also tends to decline.
And so you have this kind of strange phenomenon in economics where the way to have fewer farmers is to get better at farming. But now the flip side of that is if you're not very good at farming, which it turns out that the low-income countries in the world are, because they are especially bad at farming, Then you have a lot of farmers and you have a lot of people working in the sector that you're really, really unproductive in but that's because you need food. And so if you're unproductive at producing it, it just takes more of your labor, more of your land, more of your capital in the agricultural sector in order to meet the population's demand to eat.
And so what you have right now in the world, is just to extend this explanation a bit, what you have right now in the world is this situation where the countries that specialize really heavily in agriculture are actually relatively really unproductive at farming. And so the fact that I point to in my paper, which has been well established by other economists in the literature, is that the richest countries in the world, of course, they're richer because they're more productive. We think that productivity is what drives economic growth and drives income levels across countries.
But the rich countries in manufacturing, the 90th percentile richest countries in the world, are about four times more productive than the 10th percentile poorest countries in the world. So the rich countries factories are four times better at producing output from a given level of of of labor input and capital input than the poorest countries factories. But in agriculture, the the rich countries are 45 times more productive per worker.
Arvid Viaene: 45 times more?
Ishan Nath: yes, so the gap between rich and poor countries is 10 times greater in agriculture than in manufacturing. So if the world followed kind of the simplest econ 101 international trade equilibrium, as what economists would call it, where you specialize in the thing you're relatively good at, then we would expect to see everybody in rich countries as a farmer and everybody in poor countries works in a factory.
Because in a relative sense, the rich countries are like even more awesome at farming than they are at producing things in factories or in offices for that matter. But the actual pattern we see in the world is is the opposite. In India, something like 60% of the population works on farms. And in the US, it's 1%.
And so we have the countries in the world that are really, really unproductive at farming are the ones where all the farmers are. And so that's kind of the fact we have to confront, if we have this hope that perhaps climate change, which is likely to make poor countries much less productive in agriculture, if we hope that it'll drive people out of farming, that we have to confront this fact that they're already really, really unproductive in agriculture without much global warming haven't happened yet. And yet the population is highly concentrated in agriculture. So that's kind of where this food problem story that I'll explain the economics of more comes in to try to explain that existing pattern and help us think about how climate change might alter these patterns of specialization.
Arvid Viaene: I have this image in my mind when I think of like the US, you have these giant agricultural farms with these giant machines working on it, like super, you know, mechanized versus the more substance farms, But you've got to be able to have those machines, of course.
Ishan Nath: Of course, and there's a whole literature in economics that's trying to understand the technologies and policies and institutions that lead to agriculture being so much more productive in rich countries. But in this paper, I'm just taking that as a given. I'm not trying to figure out why that's true. I'm just trying to figure out what we can make of that.
Arvid Viaene: So we've established, they're less productive when there's a higher share of the labor force in agriculture. So the story that was told before, well, climate change will happen and they'll shift away from agriculture, but that's not the case.
Ishan Nath: So to continue down that path a little, You might expect this hopeful reallocation where people who work on farms in these places where it's getting really unproductive for agriculture as the world warms could be able to leave their farms if you thought there was a really strong role for international trade in these places. Because if trade is playing a really strong role in these economies, then you would expect that when you get worse at producing in a certain sector, you'll tend to import more in that sector and you'll tend to export more in other sectors of the economy. That's kind of how we expect productivity to drive patterns of international trade.
However, it turns out that there are basically two reasons why we think in this literature that low-income economies specialize so much in agriculture despite being relatively unproductive at farming. The first reason is that if you ignore trade for a second, as I mentioned, you have this thing called the food problem, which is that unlike other commodities, you can't live without food.
So if you're really unproductive at producing food, suppose that your country is the whole world. and you're really unproductive at producing food, you still need food. And so you end up, the price of food ends up being high such that it encourages people to work in that sector, even if it's low productivity. And in places that are going to have unproductive farms, you'll have a lot of land and labor and capital devoted to agriculture just to meet the population's subsistence demands that they have to eat. And so in the absence of trade, you would expect a lot of people to work on farms if agricultural productivity is low. Now, it turns out that in the absence of trade is actually a pretty good summary of how most low income economies work in agriculture.
And so in these places, for whatever reason, which I think we don't totally understand, they trade very, very little food. And especially it turns out to be difficult to import food into low income economies in the data. So the fact about that that I show in the paper is that in a rich country, you can expect about 45% of people spending on food to be on imports.
So in the richest quartile of the world, nearly half of our agricultural consumption is imported from some other country in the world. But in the poorest quartile of the world, the corresponding figure is 9%. So about 90% of agricultural consumption in low-income economies is produced domestically. And it's because of that, in my analysis, that's kind of the fact that drives the patterns of specialization we can see in the world, which is that in the absence of trade, you need food. So a lot of your economy has to be in farming if you're not very good at farming just to produce enough food. And then it turns out that in the absence of trade is actually a pretty good summary of what's going on in the poorest quartile of the world.
Arvid Viaene: I hadn't quite thought about that way but like you would expect them to import more food because rather you know food's relatively expensive.
Implications of for Climate Change and Adaptation
Ishan Nath: Exactly. And so it's a bit of a mystery or a bit of a puzzle in my paper. Why is it the case that low-income countries import so little food? In the paper, I basically infer that it must be really difficult for them to import food since they're not doing it, but I don't have a good explanation for exactly why. And I think there's some potential reasons for that, like road quality, infrastructure, regulatory barriers to importing.
I think it cannot all be explained by tariffs and trade policy, but that also probably plays a role. But to explain a little more about what that means for the implications of climate change. So now you have this story where we can talk a little bit more, perhaps later about where this information comes from. But you have a story where the world's getting hotter is making it especially difficult to farm in these places. Agricultural productivity is falling much more than productivity in factories and offices in low-income countries as the the world gets hotter is what the evidence would suggest.
Because there is so little trade, making it harder to farm is actually going to, in my analysis, increase the share of these economies and the share of workers in the economies that work on farms because food has these special properties where you really, really need it to survive. So if you get worse at producing food, need more people to work on producing food.
The alternative is you could imagine a situation where people in low-income economies would import more of their food as it got harder to produce food domestically because it's getting too hot. But it turns out that what we can infer from the existing data on trade flows suggests through the economic model, it's very unlikely that trade flows would respond very much because there's so little trade to begin with in these places that we infer it must be the case that it's quite difficult to trade in these places.
And so in light of that, you end up with a situation in my analysis where global warming actually leads to a greater share of workers, “stuck” in the agricultural sector that is really suffering the worst harm in these places that are hot and low income.
And it was only being in a scenario in which somehow they were much more integrated into the world's economy in terms of trade, where then you might see in response to warming, but also in response to just existing low productivity, that there might be greater food imports in low-income economies, and they might reallocate production away from farming towards places that are less vulnerable, as it turns out, to extreme temperatures.
Arvid Viaene: Got it. To summarize, the classic is you would expect them to import more food in the farms to move away. But because they're getting worse at food, which is essential, they essentially now have to work more in the sector, which they're going becoming even more unproductive in, which is like the not not a great not a great you know dynamic. Because you're already like 45 times less productive. Now you've got to work even more in that sector. Yeah.
Ishan Nath: That's right. And I think the way to think about it is like, you know, productivity, fortunately, to some degree in agriculture has improved over the last several decades in low income countries. And the share of people working on farms has been falling. But I think the way to think about it is that we can expect global warming to potentially slow each of these positive developments. We can expect it to slow the rate of productivity growth and slow the rate of people leaving farms in low income economies and kind of keep them poorer for longer.
Ishan Nath: But the way out of the paper, of course, suppose low-income economies were as integrated to trade as richer economies, or suppose they were able to implement some reforms, which we don't quite know because it's a macro paper. We don't quite know exactly which what these reforms would look like look like on the ground in this paper, but something like reduced customs duties or regulatory delays to import food or lower tariffs or things like that.
And they were more integrated into the world economy as richer countries are, then you might see more of these beneficial movements in global agricultural markets that reduce their exposure to this falling productivity or this harmful productivity effects in agriculture.
Arvid Viaene: Yeah, because in the paper you run this one simulation, you've got several. But one is where you kind of just reduce trade barriers like tariffs, trade agreements and regulatory frictions to just demonstrate. OK, what if we take those constraints away and make it essentially easier for them to trade? Like, you know, because the import share is so low, like, let's make it easier for them to trade. What is then did that give in terms of results of like mitigating these impacts of climate change?
Ishan Nath: So I guess there's like a couple layers of how you could think about this. You could think about the sort of pie in the sky. What if four countries were just as integrated to trade as rich countries? It's not clear that's possible because there might be some things that are sort of beyond the reach of policy that make it harder to trade food in low-income countries. It could be that the productivity of how well you can produce high-quality roads and have like good shipping logistics and things like that, that could be things that are difficult for policy to directly affect.
So we might not want to go all the way to the situation in which poor countries are trading just as much as rich countries. We might instead want to want to think about an intermediate hypothetical where what if they just control the things we know they can control? They make regulations and a little bit simpler, they reduce tariffs, they make it a little bit easier to trade just in terms of the the direct costs that people face when they're trying to to buy food or to so to sell food into a low income country. So that's the counterfactual that you're pointing to in which I need to look up the results. I haven't looked at these in a long time.
And so what I find when I run these different counterfactuals is in kind of the pie in the sky hypothetical, where poor countries become as integrated to trade as rich countries, their exposure in terms of welfare costs or the amount of money, equivalent money that people are losing from from the impacts of warming is about half as high if they're as open to trade as rich countries are.
And so basically, if four countries were able to to to have the trade integration of rich countries, my analysis suggests they could cut the the cost of climate change in half, or at least the productivity cost of climate change.
And then when we when we look at the things that we know they can control directly, like tariffs and regulatory barriers, then it goes down to cutting the costs by only about 15%. And so we think there are a lot of things that we can't quite explain about why low-income countries are not very closed off to trade, are are not very open to trade. And the best guess of that is kind of this transportation infrastructure and logistics, where a lot of countries are landlocked, port quality, road quality, things like that could be barriers that are harder to observe in the macro data.
Arvid Viaene: "Would you mind sharing a rough estimate of the magnitude of these impacts? I remember seeing figures like a 50% reduction in damage or numbers like 1.7 and 16 thrown around. What are the effects like, especially across agriculture and non-agricultural sectors?
Ishan Nath: Yeah. So I think my paper not really designed to answer that question very well. I think there are some other papers that answer that better. So in this paper, the total effects on productivity in the economy, so you can think of it as like roughly the effect on GDP in the worst hit countries in the world is something like 10%. Which you know the COVID recession was about a 6% drop in GDP in rich countries. So you can think of like losing 10% of GDP every year due to being hotter as a pretty big effect. But I think actually that that likely understates the effect relative to some estimates in other papers that are more about estimating the aggregate effect rather than thinking about these dynamics of which sectors people are working in and how policy can reduce the effects, which is more of the strength of the current paper that we're talking about.
So in some other work I've done with co-authors Pete Clino and Valerie Ramey from Stanford, there we are trying more to estimate the aggregate damages. And a critical thing that you have to account for there is that economies grow over time and evolve over time.
And so the effects of climate change, if you just imagined global warming happening in in one future year, you go from a not hot world to a hot world, that might be a lot less bad than if the world is hot every year and the effects can accumulate through economic growth over time, which it turns out that that a number of papers have found could be an important part of the climate change story. When you do account for this sort of dynamic accumulation of effects over time, as the economy grows more slowly rather than just being hit by a shock in one period, Then we actually estimate in that paper that some of the worst hit countries are are likely to suffer declines of GDP relative to a no climate change scenario of about 25 to 30%.
And so in that paper, we estimate what I consider to be potentially like really extreme damages on the hotter, poorer parts of the world. when you account for these sorts of dynamic growth effects. This paper, it's not really designed to estimate the headline number. It's more designed to think about how trade policy can affect the headline number. So those are the estimates I would emphasize more.
Arvid Viaene: Yeah, okay, got it. Sounds good. Because the one thing you did say is that those numbers are for the low-income hot countries. Because I think one thing your paper also mentions is there are very strong heterogeneity in impacts. Could you speak to that?
Ishan Nath: That's right. And so you know I don't have the numbers off the top of my head from the other paper, but it's something like 8%, 10%, 12%, 14% for the world on average. But it's about three times bigger than that for the world's hardest hit countries is what I find in this paper with with Pete and Valerie. Of course, that paper is not published yet, so the results could still change.
But the point about heterogeneity you make is really important. We do find in that paper that's consistent with a wide variety of literature that, you know, Minnesota is not likely to be very much harmed by climate change. There are some places where if you grew up in one of those places like I did, it's kind of intuitive to you. It's actually nice for it to get a little bit warmer in like Finland or Toronto.
Arvid Viaene: Yeah. Or Belgium for that matter,
Ishan Nath: Exactly. And that's not to say that we've we've understood and estimated every potential effect of climate change, but at least the things that are best understood and best represented in the climate models, like changes in temperature and precipitation, that's what the scientists are giving us for the the most well understood effects.
And the impact of those on the economy tends out to be turns out to be neutral or mildly positive in some of these colder parts of the world. And I want to talk a little bit more about what drives this global heterogeneity in who is affected by climate change.
What we have is kind of this really unfortunate coincidence where all of the things that make a country vulnerable to the world getting hotter and temperatures and weather becoming more extreme turn out to coincide in the same countries in the world. and so there are basically three determinants of vulnerability. And it turns out that all three of those vulnerabilities are present in the same places.
So the first of these vulnerabilities that we talked about is how hot you already are.
It's extreme heat and extreme exposure to weather that really matters. And so if you're India, if you're New Delhi, where you have a lot of hundred degree days and you're making those hundred degree days, 110 degree days. That's really a problem relative to if you're in a temperate or a colder place and you're not approaching these extreme temperature zones.
Then the second determinant of vulnerability that we've discussed a lot on this podcast is whether or not you work on a farm. The empirical estimates in this paper that we're talking about today suggest that agriculture is about 10 times more vulnerable to temperature than work in factories or offices.
And so we project something like 2% global decline in non-agricultural productivity from global warming on average across the world. But in agriculture, we project something like a 20% decline across a variety of different published papers in economics. And so that's the second determinant. The second determinant is whether you're in a temperate place or a hotter place or a colder place, farming is just a lot more sensitive to temperature for very intuitive reasons than non-farming activities.
And now the third determinant of vulnerability is if you live in a place that's richer and more productive, then your productivity is a lot less sensitive to weather. And so it turns out that due to obvious technologies like air conditioning, we can really see in the data that when you experience an extreme weather shock, whether it's a storm, whether it's an extremely hot day, whether it's a drought and you're a farmer in a rich country that can irrigate. If you're in a richer part of the world, you're reallymuch more insulated from any type of extreme weather. So we have these three determinants of vulnerability to global warming.
We have the following: Are you already in a hot place? Are you a farmer or not a farmer? And are you in a rich or poor country? And then we have this really unfortunate coincidence where the hot places are also where all the farmers work, and it's also the low-income countries.
So all three determinants of what makes you vulnerable to global warming are present in the same countries. So that's why you end up with, in a lot of the economics literature on this, this really, really concentrated impact on basically the hot, poor countries where a lot of people are farming, because all three of those things make you more vulnerable to global warming. And so that's kind of the challenge that we have to confront if we're going to think about how to make the effects of global warming less painful for the world's populations.
I think it's really fair to think that a lot of the issues with global warming are tied to the development issue. These places where a lot of people are are lower income or work on farms in hotter parts of the world; those are the places that, even without global warming, we want people to become better off and to have higher incomes and more and more comfortable lives in many ways. And the greatest challenge in my view for global warming is interfering with that process of development, and kind of keeping these parts of the world from getting richer faster.
Trade Policy as Climate Adaptation
Arvid Viaene: I think that was a great summary. I think you like we exactly with the three vulnerabilities, the concentration, I think it's one of the... think it's exactly like a great challenge of like how do we know approach it. And then to bridge that, i think that's what your paper shows, is that one of the ways we can at least help or like mitigate the impacts is through having less trade barriers for them. So instead of just mitigating climate change directly through less emissions, you can help them deal with the impacts by making it easier for them to trade with the rest of the world through whatever trade barriers there are.
Ishan Nath: I think that's very much a correct reading of the bottom line of this paper. And I think, you know, you're also getting at a broader point, which is, there are sort of two things we need to try to figure out about climate change. There is the challenge of how we can efficiently and less painfully reduce emissions without causing too much disruption and cost to people in the economy throughout the world.That's something that economists have been studying for decades, and there are thousands of papers about it.
Then there's a second thing, which is that we know at this point that there's going to be a substantial amount of climate change. There's already a good amount of climate change. We're continuing to emit at very high levels. Global emissions last year were the highest they've ever been for all of the optimistic stories about emissions and all the hopeful paths to reducing them and developments in clean energy, even in those, we're still emitting a lot. And so in the best-case scenario, we're going to have a substantial amount of climate change. So the other thing we need to figure out is, like you were saying, how do we make that less painful for people who are the most vulnerable to it? And I think that's the part of the economics literature that's still emerging. It's really only the last 10 or 15 years where economists have started to think about how economic policy affects people's ability to adapt to climate change. And I think that's where my own research agenda focuses. And so naturally I am biased towards thinking that's where hopefully a lot of future work on this topic is still to come.
Arvid Viaene: And I'm very excited to see what's going to come. Because I think even for a climate policy, like the trade dimension is just something to incorporate. So but like you said, I think it's a very good distinction exactly. How can we reduce emissions most cost-effectively and then how can we adapt the most cost-effective to the changes that are going to take place because there are going to be some changes.
Ishan Nath: Yeah, for sure. That's a lot of what motivates me to do my to to do the work that I'm trying to work on.
What’s Next in Research?
Arvid Viaene: So, what's next for you in research?
Ishan Nath: Well, so you know as a researcher, I think the dream is you always want to have lots and lots of projects and not enough time to work on them. And I feel very excited to be in that position kind of at the beginning of my research career and my research journey. I think one thing I'm especially excited to work on that I'll talk about is this paper and some of the conclusions for this paper led to a lot of other natural questions. So this paper suggests if we had a lot more trade integration in agriculture, especially in low-income economies, that maybe we could adapt better to global warming in some of the most vulnerable places.
But that led people to ask me a lot of questions that I thought were good questions, that I'm now trying to work on in new projects. So I have a newer project, trying to look at what the implications are of integration in trade and agriculture for food security? What you're really worried about is volatility in food prices and your ability of the consumers in your country to access food in crises, like when there are wars, when there are trade embargoes, also when there are weather shocks that can occur in your country or in your trade partners' countries.
How do you think about how trade policy affects that and how agricultural trade integration affects that? So I have a new project about that, that I'm working on with some of my friends and co-authors that hopefully we can do another podcast about someday.
Another related project I'm working on is that you might think with a lot of trade integration and agriculture, that could have implications for emissions, because now if you're shipping food all around the world, of course, there are emissions associated with transportation. And so we want to try to look into that. And we actually think potentially there's some counterintuitive results in a project that we have there, but we're too early to really to sell results.
So those are some of the follow-up questions that I'm thinking about in new projects related to this. But broadly, I think my research is very much about we know that the world is getting hotter and more disruptive in ways that are that reallymatter to the world's poorest people? And how can we make that less disruptive to the journey of development and try to help countries grow richer that are not currently, I think, meeting basic standards of human comfort?
A Personal Take: What Surprised You During the Research?
Arvid Viaene: Awesome. Awesome. I think that was great. I maybe have one personal question for you. I've been in research myself. Was there something that surprised you during the research or that you had not expected, like the magnitude or something that caught you off guard? Because you know research has its own way of growing on you. So is there something that surprised you during this paper where you had to reconfigure your own thinking?
Ishan Nath: Oh, totally. I mean, the headline results surprised me. Like, I thought it was a paper when I started about how we were going to move a lot of farms to Canada, and that would make climate change less bad. And then I started looking at the data and realized, well, you kind of have to face this fundamental issue of why aren't the farms already all in Canada, if the places that are farming are. And so basically, it's like the first month or two, I was working on this project, which now is many, many years ago at the beginning my PhD, where I went in thinking it was a project that would be pretty optimistic about adaptation. And then when I started looking at the patterns in the world, it was like, well, now i have to deal with the fact that you know there's some real problems for that story. So but right at the beginning, it changed my own mind.
Arvid Viaene: Great. Those are the best. Yeah. Awesome, man. Then, then I would say thank you so much for joining me. This has been really educational for me too. And I think it's awesome, the work that you're doing. So thanks so much for coming on.
Ishan Nath: Thanks for having me. This has been extremely fun. It's great to see you. I know the listeners can't see you, but I can see you on the screen.
Arvid Viaene: So thanks so much for for coming on the podcast, Ishan Nath, and good luck in your your next research.
Ishan Nath: Yeah, thanks so much. It's been a lot of fun to talk about the paper, and thanks so much for having me.