Ms. Carolyn Kousky :: Sustainability Science Program :: Center for International Development

Sustainability Science Program

Ms. Carolyn Kousky
Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
506B Rubenstein Building
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
Tel: (1) 617-496-0426
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: carolyn_kousky "at" ksgphd.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: Doctoral Fellow

Carolyn Kousky is a Doctoral Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard�s Center for International Development�and the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard University. She is a doctoral candidate in the Public Policy Program at Harvard�s Kennedy School of Government. Kousky is involved in two areas of research. The first is anthro-natural disasters, or those disasters that are a product of both human actions and natural events. Her dissertation research focuses on flooding as an example of these types of disasters. She is also interested in public policies to provide ecosystem services. She has looked at local governments in the United States that are investing in natural capital to provide flood mitigation and water purification and is now studying the design of payments for ecosystem services. A guiding question across both these areas of research is how decisions are made regarding human interventions in the environment and how such decision-making � at both the level of the individual and society � can be improved. Her research in both areas is problem-driven, employing a variety of analytic, qualitative, and econometric methods. Kousky is the current recipient of a Lincoln Institute for Land Policy dissertation fellowship and was a previous recipient of the Teresa Heinz Scholar for Environmental Research grant (2006) and the Crump Fellowship (2005). Kousky received a BS, with honors and distinction, in Earth Systems from Stanford University. �

Risk and Decision-Making: Information, Incentives, and Influence. Kousky uses flooding as a case study for investigating private and collective decision-making regarding land use that results in increased risks from anthro-natural disasters with the intent of developing policy-relevant insights for reducing disaster losses. Monetary losses in the United States attributable to natural disasters increased exponentially since 1960. Floods accounted for the highest number of lives lost and the most property damage of all natural disasters in the 20th century. Central to reducing these losses is recognizing that damages from many disasters are not just the result of destructive natural forces, but the product of interactions between human systems and natural systems. Econometric, analytic, and qualitative methods are employed in the four papers that make up her dissertation. The first paper asks how people update their assessment of flood risk following a major flood event. The change in property values in Chesterfield, Missouri, in and out of the floodplain, following the catastrophic 1993 flood on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers is estimated. The second paper asks why firms would choose to locate in a floodplain when they are aware of the risk and develops a theoretical model of firm decision-making and tests it with GIS and interview data from Chesterfield. The third paper builds on joint research already undertaken with Richard Zeckhauser, in which externalities imposed on others who are spatially or temporally distant from the actor undertaking the activity are examined and policy mechanisms for managing these �risk externalities� are discussed. The fourth paper asks why some communities choose to use wetlands to control flooding (an ecosystem services policy) as opposed to the traditional engineering solutions.