GCSI 2025 Spin-Off – Environmental and Social Cost Monetization

The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, a joint undertaking between the School of the Environment and Yale Law School, advances sustainability governance, finance, and research with data-driven analyses. As a leading initiative in evidence-based policymaking, the Center’s work promotes applying science and law to enhance the resilience and impact of sustainability policies in countries around the world.

The Global Commons Stewardship Index (GCSI) is a research initiative focused on measuring the environmental and social impacts of consumption worldwide. Historically, GCSI has developed methodologies and metrics to capture cross-border spillovers in consumption.

The selected Research Assistant will participate in the development and implementation of new methods to monetize externalities—such as biodiversity loss and health impacts from pollution—under a Planetary Boundaries framework. This work will involve:

• Applying and testing existing methodologies on different groups of countries (e.g., low- and middle-income countries) to estimate social externalities.
• Developing environmental externality metrics, with a focus on nitrogen pollution and terrestrial biodiversity.
• Contributing to both quantitative and qualitative analyses that will appear in the annual GCSI report,
• Optional: Potential work in close collaboration with organizations such as the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

Successful findings from this project may be integrated into future, large-scale GCSI updates.

RA Role and Responsibilities:

• Data Collection & Preparation: Gather and clean relevant environmental, economic, and health indicators for selected countries or regions.
• Analysis:
  • Conduct descriptive statistics, basic regressions, and visualizations to link consumption patterns with externality costs.
  • Perform more advanced statistical analysis such as time clustering,
  • Perform Monte Carlo or similar uncertainty analyses to evaluate the robustness of results.
• Reporting: Contribute to a concise written report (~20 pages) detailing key findings, methodology, and policy implications.
• Meetings: Attend in-person check-ins at least once weekly from June 2–July 11; remote collaboration possible from July 14–25