With the growth in concerns about the potential societal impacts of global environmental changes such as greenhouse warming, most efforts have concentrated on climate monitoring and modeling. To date, there have been but limited efforts to improve our understanding of the economic and social impacts of the greenhouse effect. This project continues collaborative work designed to improve understanding of both substantive and methodological developments concerning the economic and social impacts of global change. It involves a substantive research program to study the impacts of global climate change and an annual conference to review ongoing research in the social sciences on the impacts of global environmental change. The specific research will continue studies of the impacts in two areas: (1) the collection of a data base for the United States that combines climatic and economic data, particularly agricultural data, on a county level; and (2) use of the county climate and economic data base to estimate the impact of climate and climate change on economic activity.
