Current and Future Research Interests
My work at Climate Analytics focuses heavily on loss and damage and the state of climate and interdisciplinary science on those topics. To support this work, I am particularly interested in
1) attribution science to support legal action in the case of extreme climate events,
2) impact modeling and forecasting across a range of sectors: public health, disaster management, energy sector, agricultural/food security, coastal resilience, and water sector applications
3) insurance and microfinance approaches to addressing climate risk for vulnerable populations and sectors – including index/parametric insurance and forecast based financing.
Here is a recent presentation I gave to students at University of Colorado, Denver
and here is a similar presentation I gave to the personnel at the NASA-GISS facility in New York City.
Past Research
Pre Climate Analytics, Post IRI (2023-2024):
In March of 2024, I was a panelist at Loyola University Chicago’s Climate Change Conference.
Loyola University Chicago Panel Presentation (March 2024)
ClimateBase Fellow Led Session (November 2023)
American Geophysical Union (AGU) Chapman Conference Presentation (June 2023)
Rutgers Assistant Professor Seminar (May 2023)
City College New York (CCNY) Assistant Professor Seminar (February 2023)
Recent IRI employment (2016-2022): During my recent time at IRI, most of my research focused more on seasonal forecasting using a multi-model approach. Most of my role at IRI focused on making forecasts and training international partners to make forecasts, so I didn’t have as much time to do research for peer reviewed publication as I would have liked. I did also write a large number of reports during my employment at IRI, contributed to a book on climate and public health action and helped develop some curricula (mentioned on the teaching page). In 2023, I did have one collaborative paper on the relationship between climate drivers and malaria epidemics in Ethiopia. Most of this work focuses on seasonal forecasting in different contexts in Africa. Most of my work at IRI was highly collaborative both within IRI and with international partners. Select peer reviewed papers, conference proceedings, book contributions and reports are shared below,.
Woyessa et al., 2023, Malaria Journal: climate and malaria in Ethiopia
Teshome et al. 2022, Atmospheric and Climate Sciences: seasonal forecasting over Ethiopia
Iyakaremye et al. 2021, Atmospheric Research: observed climate change in Africa using CMIP6
Ehsan et al. 2021, Climate Dynamics: seasonal forecasting over Ethiopia
Siebert et al. 2019, International Journal of Climatology: Rwanda Climatology
contributing author to book “Climate Information for Public Health Action: Thomson and Mason, 2018, Routledge
Princeton Postdoc (2015-2016): During my postdoc at Princeton from 2015-2016, I was a part of an interdisciplinary collaborative effort to understand the interaction between a hypothetical carbon tax, emissions, direct climate damages, population and public health. My colleagues in this endeavor were economists, philosophers, public health experts and engineers – but the integrated assessment modeling (IAM) framework we used was conceived by the Yale economist William Nordhaus. The links for the publications that emerged from this collaboration (2015-2019) are given below.
The papers published during this period of my career have gotten more citation than other papers in other phases of my career. I think our collaborative work illustrated some important concepts in a heuristic manner. But it should be noted that there are many critiques of the Nordhaus IAMs and that the carbon tax framework that underpins these modeling studies does not exist in practice, because there are many complex political and societal barriers to implementing a carbon tax.
Budolfson et al. 2019, World Bank Economic Review: climate policy and economic development
Budolfson et al. 2017, Climatic Change: climate policy, time, inequity and catastrophes
Dennig et al. 2015, PNAS: climate policy and inequality
Rutgers PhD (2009-2014): My dissertation research focused on understanding the long term viability of index insurance as an adaptation tool in the context of the West African Sahel (using a wide array of both observational and climate model data along with statistical extreme event simulation methods). My dissertation was a theoretical study, but there have since been some projects initiating climate index insurance schemes on the ground in West Africa. Most, however, still do not consider long-term climate change explicitly and design pricing considerations on a year to year basis.
My dissertation defense presentation is below
The links for my publications on climate index insurance and hydroclimate extremes from 2011-2016 are shown below.
Siebert 2016, Weather, Climate and Society: index insurance design/evaluation in the Sahel
Siebert 2016, Climatic Change: index insurance future scenarios in Sahel based on CMIP5
Siebert 2014, Geography Compass: African hydroclimate variability review
Ward, Siebert and Ndiaye, 2012, AMMA conference: historical hydroclimate extremes in Sahel
Siebert and Ward, 2011, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology: extreme event analysis of Millennium Villages (won the Association of American Geographers Climate Specialty Group John Mather paper of the year award in 2012)
First IRI employment (2006-2008):
My role at IRI from 2006-2008 was a focused on index insurance design for a dozen Millennium Villages in Africa (using only historical data). During this time, IRI also had an internal workshop on a number of applied climate science topics which led to some other publications.
I was a contributing author to report “Index Insurance and Climate Risk: Prospects for Development and Disaster Management”
Hellmuth et al. 2009, IRI: index insurance report
Greene et al. 2008, IRI: Near term Climate Change
Ceccato et al. 2008, IRI: Remote Sensing – Vegetation
Siebert et al. 2008 AMS: Seasonal climate characteristics in Senegal and Mali
Ward et al. 2008, AMS: Millennium Village Project Index Insurance
NYCDEP/NASA-GISS Intern (2005-2006): During the summer of 2005, the academic year 2005-6 (while I was an MA student at Columbia) and June of 2006, I was an intern at the NASA-GISS facility in New York, working at the Center for Climate Systems Research (CCSR) on a project sponsored by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection – to assess climate risks for NYC. I was a contributing author to a large report that emerged from this work a few years later and collaborated on some work with model based sea level rise projections.
Gornitz et al. 2006, Geographic Society of America (GSA) conference
Undergrad (2002): While my junior papers and senior thesis were not published, one course on natural hazards and policy led to a student presentation to the US Senate Hazards Caucus.
asclimateservices.org 