Originally published in our December 2021 newsletter (Issue 12)
Prof. Karen Fisher-Vanden has been recently elected as the President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) where she previously served on the Board of Directors. In this article we highlight Prof. Fisher-Vanden’s career and contributions to the MultiSector Dynamics community.
Karen Fisher-Vanden is Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and Public Policy, and Director of the Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science (SAFES) at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Fisher-Vanden holds a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Economics both from UC Davis, a M.S. in Management Science from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University. She was a Lead Author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Working Group III Report, and served on the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Product Development Advisory Committee and lead author of a congressionally-mandated CCSP ‘s Synthesis and Assessment Report report on global change scenarios. She was recently named President-elect of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE) where she previously served on the Association’s Board of Directors. She has also served as a member of the EPA Science Advisory Board on Economy-wide modeling. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Review of Environmental Economics and Policy (REEP), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO), Energy Economics, and Journal of Global Economic Analysis (JGEA). She has led a number of large externally-funded research programs and is currently co-Director and Principal Investigator of the Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems (PCHES), a large Cooperative Research Agreement with the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research, MultiSector Dynamics program.
Her area of research primarily focuses on economy-wide and integrated modeling for climate change impact and adaptation analysis. The interactions between energy, water, and land systems are poorly understood, yet have important implications for food security, reliability of electric power supply, demographic patterns, risk and response behaviors, and the resilience of communities and critical infrastructure. This type of work has required working on multidisciplinary teams and coupling a variety of tools including statistical tools, data products, and computational models. The figure below shows the type of modeling frameworks that she and her team have developed to capture integrated energy-water-land (EWL) systems dynamics and interdependent infrastructures.
This work is motivated by the recognition that most studies focus on one sector in isolation from the others—e.g., effects of changes in climate on the agricultural sector or the power system. These studies are missing not only important human responses to these sectoral impacts, but also the interlinkages between sectors. For example, water shortages not only impact each of these sectors individually, but responses to these shortages by one sector are likely to affect others since these sectors are competing for scarce water. By connecting these physical systems models with a socio-economic model, the team is able not only to capture important human responses to sectoral impacts but are also able, through the passing of prices and demand, to capture sectoral interlinkages. For example, climate change impacts on the power sector will increase electricity prices which will affect the cost of production in other sectors and sales of goods and services. The socio-economic model can be thought of as the coordinator of information passing across these physical systems models to capture important sectoral interlinkages.Dr. Fisher-Vanden’s research has been published in journals such as the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Climatic Change, Energy Economics, and Land Economics
