September 2023: Dr. Ian Sue Wing (CAS Earth & Environment)
Ian Sue Wing is a Professor in the Department of Earth & Environment at Boston University. He conducts research and teaching on the economic analysis of energy and environmental policy, with an emphasis on climate change and computational general equilibrium (CGE) analysis of economic adjustment to policy and natural environmental shocks. His current research focuses on characterizing the broader economic consequences of climate change impacts in a variety of areas (energy systems, agriculture and forestry, and human health), assessing the implications for society’s capacity to mitigate future emissions of greenhouse gasses, and simulating the regional economic impacts of natural disasters. He has been supported by grants from the California Energy Commission, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation (NSF). He has been a member of advisory and review panels for the DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Research Council and NSF, and served as a contributing author to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report and the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment. Learn more about Professor Sue Wing in his full interview below.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/ why does social science matter to you?
My undergraduate degree was in engineering, a subject that I was not particularly good at. I would hear students, and a few times even faculty, grumble that cool innovative technologies fell by the wayside and went unadopted because their benefits were lost on a public that lacked foresight and technological sophistication. As time went on I began to question this line of thinking: surely it can’t simply be ignorance; couldn’t it be that other things contributed to that outcome? Accordingly, for my masters I switched to studying economics, which gave me the perspective I needed: technologies exist within social frameworks of markets and institutions, and it is the dynamics of these entities, as much as the characteristics of the technologies themselves, that determine whether—and how—the latter get used, and what benefits and costs—that all too often the innovators don’t foresee—might arise. I was fortunate enough to do my doctoral work in an interdisciplinary program which afforded me the opportunity to keep one foot in each world, reconciling technological progress from both engineering and economic perspectives, and understanding the implications for addressing the problem of climate change.
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
I established a collaboration with researchers at BU’s School of Public Health to advance understanding of the effectiveness of air conditioning (AC) as an adaptation to the kinds of extreme heat exposures that are likely to increase with climate change. My PhD student obtained a large dataset on individuals who were admitted to hospital, and we are using statistical techniques from epidemiology to model how heat exposures affect the probability of hospitalization for individuals with and without AC. The results help us quantify three things: (i) how much AC can protect us by reducing the probability that extreme heat makes us sick enough to need hospital care, (ii) the extent to which expanding AC ownership, or access to cooling more generally, might help offset the health effects of rising temperatures, and (iii) how differences in cooling access, and thus the ability to adapt to increasing heat, lead to disparities in health risks and climate vulnerability.
What is the best piece of professional advice you ever received?
One of my PhD mentors, who unfortunately passed away last year, would always admonish me in colorful language to “go for the jugular”: to not waste my intellectual effort on issues that were likely to make minor contributions, but instead allocate your mental effort to contribute to solving about problems that were really important, big and hard.
What is your favorite course you’ve taught at BU?
Environmental Policy Analysis and Modeling (CAS EE545) a rigorous, calculus-based introduction to microeconomics for environmental regulation. I created this class when I first came to BU in 2002 and have continued to develop and teach it over the years. The course is challenging—deliberately so, but Earth & Environment majors get a lot out of it: they learn how to think like economists, use math to apply that thinking to environmental issues, and practice interpreting what the mathematical results tell us about how to design policies to address environmental problems. I wish I had had such a class when I was an undergraduate. That’s why I teach it.
Tell us a surprising fact about yourself.
My last name is an Anglicization of my grandfather’s Cantonese surname. The fact that I’m a Black man with a West Indian accent and Chinese heritage routinely surprises people. But that’s common in Trinidad, where I am from: much of the population is racially and culturally mixed in different ways, making it one of the most diverse countries in the world.