NatuRE Policy Lab

Dasha Ageikina presented ongoing research on the impacts of media coverage on the allocation of public resources to fighting wildfire. She hypothesizes that media coverage increases the pressure on public officials to take action to control a fire, possibly in ways that are not welfare enhancing.

Matt Dudek presented his work on the impact of grid-scale battery storage capacity on electricity prices in California. A key barrier to expanding renewable energy production is the daily mismatch between intermittent generation and electricity demand. For example, despite a massive expansion in the low marginal cost solar power production, electricity can only be produced from these sources when the sun is shining.

New ARE faculty member Dr. Jay Sayre presented his work on the use of remote sensing methods to predict agricultural and ecological outcomes at fine scale using only relatively aggregated, publicly available data. He showed how he and his co-authors combine machine learning algorithms that capture agronomic features of crop growth trained on satellite imagery to estimate maize yields in Mexico.

Kyumin Kim’s research focuses on the impact of diversification on risk and return in the context of fishing revenues in Alaskan fishing communities. Unlike earlier studies, Kyumin adopts the principles of modern portfolio theory to analyze and elucidate the risk-return tradeoff in commercial fishing, specifically at the community level.

Yuexuan (Kelly) Wu presented ongoing research on the impact of a deforestation moratorium in Indonesia. Since 2000, Indonesia has seen a 17% reduction in forest cover. Much of the forest loss can be attributed to fires that are used to permanently clear land for agriculture. If the moratorium is effective, we should expect that land-clearing fire activity decreases in areas impacted by the moratorium relative to areas that are not impacted by the moratorium.