C R U C I A L


Climate Risk and Uncertainty Collective Intelligence Aggregation Laboratory


CRUCIAL’s mission is to deliver calibrated, high-quality climate-risk forecasts.


We employ expert prediction markets – hosted on the AGORA prediction-market platform – to elicit, aggregate, and summarise knowledge on future climate risks, drawing on expertise from diverse areas of physical, social, and policy science.

Climate-risk information provision faces severe challenges

Bad Incentives
The Climate Service Provider (CSP) industry is growing rapidly to meet demand. In this drive to meet growing demand, a number of issues rooted in adverse incentives have been overlooked.
Data gaps
Data gaps are particularly substantial and pressing for forward-looking risk information. And where forward-looking information exists, it is largely based on (i) announced intentions, or (ii) scenarios for which relative likelihood information currently does not exist.
Circularity problem
Unconditional forecasts of global temperature alone have an ambiguous interpretation. Suppose a forecast portends a small global temperature anomaly. Are future temperatures low because CO2 emissions will be tamed aggressively, or because climate turns out to be much less sensitive to atmospheric CO2 concentrations than currently believed?
Abundance of Choice
Complex statistical analysis and mathematical modelling involve multitudes of choices and assumptions. Recent “many analysts, one data set” studies show the danger of relying solely on one research team. Here we present several examples from this literature.
Multi-disciplinary problem
Top emitters have a large influence on the annual rate of GHG emissions. To develop an understanding of the anthropogenic contribution to future CO2 concentrations, there is a need for country specialists in the politics, energy policies, environmental regulations, and economics of each substantial emitter.

AGORA prediction market platform

AGORA is a platform for hosting sophisticated prediction markets that can aggregate the output of quantitative predictive models alongside more tacit forms of expert knowledge. AGORA was originally created by the investment manager Winton Group before being further developed by its technology spinout, Hivemind.

AGORA supports markets that generate high-resolution joint probability distributions from the trading activity of participants, who can use the AGORA UI or trade programmatically using an API.

AGORA has been tested over the past three years and used to run prediction markets with expert participants for forecasting seasonal temperatures and rainfall, Atlantic hurricane activity, and El Niño events. Hivemind transferred the IP for AGORA to Lancaster University in 2022 for use in CRUCIAL.

Figure: The evolution of prices in a joint-outcome market for UK monthly temperature and rainfall for June 2018. The participants were 24 teams from British universities. Winton Group sponsored the real-money incentive pot (£55,000). The black dots show the values of temperature and rainfall for previous Junes and the blue cross shows the actual value for June 2018.


Team

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Brett Day

University of Exeter

Professor of Environmental Economics

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Kim Kaivanto

Lancaster University

Senior Lecturer in Economics

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Mark Roulston

University of Exeter

Honorary Senior Research Fellow

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Todd Kaplan

University of Exeter

Professor of Economics

Papers & Publications

Talks and events

Expert Prediction Markets for Climate Risks
In this talk, Mark Roulston discusses how LMSR Automated Market Maker prediction markets can solve key challenges of climate risk forecasting.
Manipulation and (Mis)Trust in Prediction Markets
In this talk, Todd Kaplan (UoExeter, UoHaifa, CRUCIAL) presents joint work with Lawrence Choo and Ro’i Zultan on the effect that the presence of manipulators has on trust in prediction markets.
Joint-Outcome Expert Information Markets for Climate Risks: Conditional Forecasting with the LMSR
Kim Kaivanto on the properties and potential of CRUCIAL’s LMSR platform at the EFAG Second Summer Symposium for Sustainability hosted by Durham University.
Joint-Outcome Expert Prediction Markets for Climate Risks: Conditional Forecasting with the LMSR
Kim Kaivanto on the properties and potential of CRUCIAL’s LMSR platform at the inaugural Experimental Sustainable Finance symposium hosted by Radboud University.
Expert Prediction Markets for Climate Risks
In this talk, Mark discusses prediction markets for forecasting climate risk, CRUCIAL and its AGORA platform, and the soon-to-open Crucial Atlantic Hurricane Market 2024 (CAHM24).
Markets, Information, and Feedback
In this talk, Todd Kaplan (UoExeter, UoHaifa, CRUCIAL) discusses potential feedback effects in equity markets and prediction markets.
Expert Prediction Markets for Climate Risk
Dr Kim Kaivanto and Dr Mark Roulston introduce CRUCIAL at the Pentland Centre.
A viability study of joint-outcome prediction markets for climate risk
We demonstrate the viability of highly granular, two-dimensional (joint) outcome spaces with markets for monthly UK rainfall and temperature.
Two projects on learning from markets: bank runs and climate change predictions
We use a lab experiment to study the endogeneity between stock market prices and bank runs. We also propose how prediction markets can be used to provide climate change predictions.
Prediction Markets for Climate Risk
A workshop about an initiative to address emerging problems with the provision of climate risk information. 8 Feb 2022, Woburn House, London

Partners

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The AGORA platform was developed by the Winton Group.

Winton Group


Contact

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