Evidence Based Environmental Policy: From Clean Air Today to Longer Lives Tomorrow

Global urbanization holds both great promise and intrinsic peril: the same density that raises incomes and enables the synthesis of new ideas also stresses the natural environment. The dimensions of air pollution and climate change problems around the world can defy the usual scope of policy-making and research. This talk explores how advances in environmental economics, including the use of natural and field experiments, have enabled clean identification of the costs of air pollution and opened up new ways of framing and evaluating environmental policy. These themes are discussed in the context of on-going research with India's Ministry of Environment and Forests, with a focus on research that tackles India's challenges with fine particulate air pollution.

About Dr. Ananth Sudershan:

Anant Sudarshan is the India Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago and a Senior Research Associate at the Department of Economics, Chicago University. His research lies at the intersection of energy policy, behavioral science, environmental economics, and engineering. His present work includes an ambitious project to design and evaluate a pilot emissions trading program for Indian industry in partnership with India's Ministry for Environment and Forests. He has also carried out field trials to understand the effects of providing real time electricity consumption feedback to households and empirical research on the effectiveness of California energy efficiency policy. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Anant was the Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He received his PhD in Management Science and Engineering, focusing on energy economics, from Stanford University in March 2011 and he holds undergraduate and masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi) and Stanford University respectively.