Different questions, same mission: Meet the environmental policy bench at UVA Batten
Environmental policy has always demanded researchers who can work across disciplines and sectors. At the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, a group of five diverse, cross-disciplinary environmental policy faculty members are proving just how wide that range needs to be – and just how much stronger the work is because of it.
Andrew Wilson researches the links between the environment and human health. Jenna Anders studies the economics of federal-state cooperation. Jay Shimshack applies economics to environmental regulation and enforcement. Benjamin Converse uses behavioral science to investigate how people respond to emerging climate technologies. Molly Lipscomb works in international development, exploring ways that economics tools can help bring infrastructure services to the poorest.
Together, it’s a faculty built to meet a moment that no single discipline can handle alone. Here’s a closer look at the fields shaping environmental policy at UVA Batten – and the researchers behind them.
Public health
Andrew Wilson, an assistant professor of public policy and economics, studies the relationship between the environment and human health. He’s leading the large collaborative team behind a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, stringing together decades of data across 30 countries to understand how ambient temperature impacts human mortality.
The findings show that temperature is responsible for 5% to 12% of total deaths across the countries studied, with cold killing more people than heat in virtually every context.
Wilson’s contribution includes assembling detailed sub-national mortality data to sharpen those estimates. A secondary goal of the project is making that dataset publicly available, lowering the barrier for other researchers working on related questions.
This is important because, as Wilson notes, acting on these findings isn’t simple: “We don’t have a lot of evidence about what works to protect people from climate risks, but environmental policy isn’t normally free – and affordability tradeoffs are especially salient right now.”
The economics of public participation in regulation
Jay Shimshack, professor of public policy and economics, also emphasizes that the link between the environment and human health is often overlooked. Recent estimates suggest that air pollution alone accounts for an estimated nine million premature deaths globally each year – more than malaria, HIV and tuberculosis combined. But because those costs are diffused and borne by people other than those who generate the pollution, basic economics pushes toward less protections.
“Public goods like clean air and clean water are underprovided,” Shimshack said. “That’s not a political statement. It’s a market failure.”
His latest research, published in the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, observes this tension through the lens of an enforcement question: Do citizen complaints actually work as a regulatory tool? The work draws on nearly two decades of complaint data from Texas matched to regulatory records across more than 23,000 facilities.
The findings are striking: complaints trigger follow-up investigations that uncover twice as many violations as standard monitoring, and violations that are ten times more severe. Eliminating citizen complaints while holding agency budgets constant would deteriorate regulatory and environmental outcomes, the research suggests.
The economics of federal-state enforcement
Jenna Anders, an assistant professor of public policy and economics, studies interactions between federal and state governments, and how the two can complement each other.
Her research examines what happened to state-level environmental enforcement after the Environmental Protection Agency’s workforce was cut in 2011. The finding is counterintuitive: even in cases the federal EPA never directly touched, state penalties for environmental violations declined after federal capacity shrank.
The explanation reaches back to the EPA’s earliest days, when its first administrator described the agency as a “gorilla in the closet” for states – a background threat that gave state regulators leverage over the companies they oversee. When the gorilla shrinks, that leverage weakens, even when the federal agency isn’t in the room.
“There are a lot of areas where federal and state agencies interface in similar ways,” Anders said. “These results indicate that when we’re thinking about managing the scope of the federal agencies, we should also be considering how this will affect the states.”
That broader focus on federal-state dynamics also shows up in other aspects of her work. She has a related paper recently published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy on how eligibility expansions in federal assistance programs affect take-up.
Behavioral science and emerging technologies
Benjamin Converse, professor of behavioral science and public policy, studies the social dimensions of climate technologies that go beyond emissions reductions – approaches like atmospheric methane removal, solar geoengineering and large-scale carbon capture. These ideas, he says, “can become politically charged before the science has matured enough to support confident policy choices.”
Converse recently served on the National Academies of Sciences committee that published the first major research assessment of atmospheric methane removal. His contributions helped ensure the committee took the social questions seriously: How would people respond to these technologies being implemented? What governance structures would be required? What are the risks that the mere existence of a technological fix reduces pressure to cut emissions in the first place?
“It was a genuinely interdisciplinary process,” he said, “and I think that reflects the kind of work this moment demands.”
International development
Molly Lipscomb, associate professor of public policy and economics, works at the intersection of environmental policy and international development, often in places where reliable data has been historically hard to find. She has studied municipal sewage infrastructure in Cape Town, looking at how community behavior impacts sewer blockages and whether better information can change behavior and outcomes.
Other work has taken her to Senegal and Burkina Faso, where she worked with NGOs and the government to redesign sanitation service auctions, reducing the power of what had effectively become a cartel controlling manual waste removal.
More recently, Lipscomb has applied artificial intelligence tools to climate-driven food insecurity in Lesotho, partnering with farmers, researchers and workers to explore whether responsibly designed AI can translate complex agricultural guidance into timely, accessible insights for farmers facing increasingly volatile growing conditions due to climate change.
For Lipscomb, research is always in service of a practical question. With rapid technological advances, there is suddenly the potential to provide the poorest with access to infrastructure and technologies that were out of reach only a few years ago. Finding the best ways of doing this is a policy design problem that requires additional research in order to reach the most people at the lowest possible cost.
Why the range of disciplines matters
What makes UVA Batten’s approach distinctive isn’t any single methodology or ideology. It’s the range and the cross-disciplinary conversations that happen because of it.
Lipscomb credits the school for having the breadth to field a real team.
“We have people covering climate change, legislative incentives, firm behavior, inequality and international development,” she said. “That lets us engage the full landscape rather than one corner of it.”
Converse describes the deeper requirement as a kind of “multilingualism,” not just awareness that other disciplines exist, but the willingness to learn their languages.
“You have to be honest about the limits of your tools,” he said, “clear about where uncertainty still rules and curious enough to ask good questions of people who know things you don’t.”
Shimshack ties that range back to a shared standard, not just a shared subject: an evidence-based, deliberately non-partisan ethos focused on what works, not what feels right.
“Good intentions don’t always lead to good outcomes,” he said. “We need evidence.”
