Real Option Analysis and Climate Change: A New Framework for Environmental Policy Analysis

This book sets out to reframe the theory of real options so that it can be used to support environmental investments for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Climate change policy often involves making decisions that concern extended time periods, and doing so under considerable uncertainty. By expanding and broadening the framework of real options, this book first introduces readers to new ways of quantifying investment decisions that can much more effectively address the shape and size of the uncertainty than traditional approaches using Net Present Value. In turn, the second part of the book applies this new theoretical framework to climate change policy by presenting a number of examples, and by providing a general perspective on investment decisions related to climate change and how to prioritize them.

Benoît Morel did his Phd in theoretical high energy Physics in the university of Geneva. His post-doctoral career took him to Harvard university, Caltech and Stanford university before he joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, in the department of Engineering and Public Policy. At Carnegie Mellon his research was at the interface between mathematics and policy analysis. In addition to do research on the subject, he taught a course in Real Options for more than ten years.
Together with his colleagues in his department at Carnegie Mellon University, he participated to a variety of projects in climate change policy analysis.