Environmental Economist Charles Taylor Shares his Thoughts on Land Use and Climate Policy in Newest Episode of “Environmental Insights”

CAMBRIDGE MA. – The ways in which land use and environmental policies intersect with natural resource sustainability and climate change were the focus of discussion in the newest episode of “Environmental Insights: Discussions on Policy and Practice from the Harvard Environmental Economics Program” featuring Charles Taylor, assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

The podcast is produced by the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. Listen to the interview here.

Hosted by Robert N. Stavins, A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy and Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements, Environmental Insights is intended to promote public discourse on important issues at the intersection of economics and environmental policy.

Taylor, whose research often uses satellite data to address policy questions, told Stavins he first got interested in land use issues during his time spent as a consultant at McKinsey & Company following his undergraduate years at the University of Virginia.

“I got to go work abroad in Qatar, Brazil, and Europe, and get a lot of exposure to these big climate change and land-based initiatives that governments and the private sector were doing. And I got really excited by that, and also very quickly learned I didn't want to be a consultant,” he said. “I felt that I wanted to get more either skin in the game at that time or more in depth into the issues, and that prompted my journey into more of the entrepreneurial world.”

Taylor soon connected with David Tepper, a former banker who shared his passion for land use issues, and together they co-founded Earth Partners, a private company that provides land restoration and bio-energy services intended to help rebuild soils, habitats, and other critical ecosystems.

“How do we restore ecosystems to meet all the challenges we're facing, from water to food security to pollution to climate change, and how do we do that at scale? [The idea was to] start a company [dedicated to] next generation land management,” he remarked. “A lot of the challenges we're facing as a society directly or relate to land management, and looking around, I didn't really see any companies or organizations taking that head on.”

Taylor said he decided to pivot from his entrepreneurial venture into academia once he realized the limits of what can be accomplished with capital alone.

“We had great small-scale investors who wanted to do good things, but you still had to get their money back in a few years and that limits the scope of what you can do if you really want transformational change,” he stated. “So, that made me say, okay, what if I went back to the research side and found some way I could contribute to these problems on the other side while keeping one foot or at least half my brain in this world of how this… on the ground world works?”

Much of Taylor’s current academic research relates directly to environmental economics and is intended to inform lawmakers and other stakeholders of the benefits of specific policy choices.

“Humans have touched nearly every acre of non-barren land on earth. We've transformed it. We farm it for our food. We take its water. We shape its rivers for reservoirs, for irrigation. We use the wood for forests. We build on it for housing… We get our energy out of it, increasingly for renewable energy. We need a lot of it for siting wind and solar. And then climate change interacts with all this,” he said. “So, there's all these questions I am really curious about [and am interested in] quantifying and using some of the empirical tools we have [to do that].”

Taylor referenced a recent paper he co-authored with Caltech Assistant Professor Hannah Druckenmiller that examines land use regulation under the Clean Water Act.

“You might see this spurious relationship between where wetlands are lost and more flood damages, for example, to think of one of the benefits of wetlands. And that paper was just trying to find an empirical way to uncover that and give an estimate of the value of wetlands that then could be used by the EPA in measuring the cost and benefits of these types of regulations, which are super important and cover almost all land use decisions and where you're going to build in the U.S.,” he explained.

Taylor’s interview is the sixth episode of 2024 in the Environmental Insights series, with future episodes scheduled to drop each month.

“Environmental Insights is intended to inform and educate listeners about important issues relating to an economic perspective on developments in environmental policy, including the design and implementation of market-based approaches to environmental protection,” said Stavins. “We speak with accomplished Harvard colleagues, other academics, and practitioners who are working on solving some of the most challenging public problems we face.”

Environmental Insights is hosted on SoundCloud and is also available on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, and Spotify.

LINK TO PODCAST: https://on.soundcloud.com/R13SP8xdg5U67RRa8