The Social Cost of Carbon: Advances in Long-Term Probabilistic Projections of Population, GDP, Emissions, and Discount Rates

This repository contains the socioeconomic and emissions projections generated by the Resources for the Future Socioeconomic Projections (RFF-SPs) model as discussed in Rennert et al., "The Social Cost of Carbon: Advances in Long-Term Probabilistic Projections of Population, GDP, Emissions, and Discount Rates" , forthcoming at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. The data take the form of a Monte Carlo simulation with n = 10,000 draws.

File structure and column metadata are described here:  

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emissions/  
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- rffsp_co2_emissions.csv  
- rffsp_ch4_emissions.csv  
- rffsp_n2o_emissions.csv  

Each file in this folder contains 3 columns: sample, year, and value. For each row:  

- sample contains the number identifying which draw a prediction belongs to (from 1 to 10,000).  
- year contains the calendar year of the prediction.  
- value contains the projected annual global emissions of the gas specified in the filename. IMPORTANT: Units are as follows: "rffsp_co2_emissions.csv" is in gigatons C (not CO2), "rffsp_ch4_emissions.csv " is in megatons CH4, and "rffsp_n2o_emissions.csv " is in megatons N2 (not N2O). 

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pop_income/  
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- rffsp_pop_income_run_1.feather  
- rffsp_pop_income_run_2.feather  
- rffsp_pop_income_run_3.feather  
. 
. 
. 
- rffsp_pop_income_run_9999.feather  
- rffsp_pop_income_run_10000.feather  

This folder contains 10,000 files in the .feather file format (https://arrow.apache.org/docs/python/feather.html), which is optimized for I/O speed and compressed to minimize storage requirements. Each file corresponds to one draw of our socioeconomic data, and contains 4 columns: Country, Year, Pop, and GDP. The number in each filename corresponds to the "sample" column in the emissions data. For each row:

- Country contains the ISO Alpha-3 code (https://www.iso.org/iso-3166-country-codes.html) of the country whose GDP and population are projected. 
- Year contains the calendar year of the predictions.  
- Pop contains the projected population for a given country and year, in units of thousands of people.  
- GDP contains the projected GDP for a given country and year, in units of millions of 2011 USD. 

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The probabilistic population projections were produced by Adrian E. Raftery and Hana Ševčíková (University of Washington), using the methods described by Raftery and Ševčíková (2021). Please cite this reference in any publications using these projections. Their research was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) under NIH grant number R01 HD-070936.  

The probabilistic economic and emissions projections are from Rennert et al. (forthcoming), based in part on those from Müller, Stock, and Watson (forthcoming). 

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References  

Müller, U.K, Stock, J.H., and Watson, M.W. (forthcoming). An Econometric Model of International Growth Dynamics for Long-Horizon Forecasting. The Review of Economics and Statistics, available online 30 October 2020. URL: https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_00997/97738/An-Econometric-Model-of-International-Growth 

Raftery, A.E. and Ševčíková, H. (2021). Probabilistic population forecasting: Short to very long-term. International Journal of Forecasting, available online 7 October 2021. URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207021001394  

Rennert, K., Prest, B.C., Pizer, W., Newell, R.G., Anthoff, D., Kingdon, C., Rennels, L., Cooke, R., Raftery, A.E., Ševčíková, H, and Errickson, F. (forthcoming). The Social Cost of Carbon: Advances in Long-Term Probabilistic Projections of Population, GDP, Emissions, and Discount Rates. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Available online 27 October 2021. URL: https://www.rff.org/publications/working-papers/the-social-cost-of-carbon-advances-in-long-term-probabilistic-projections-of-population-gdp-emissions-and-discount-rates/