Tamma Carleton

Tamma Carleton is an Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds affiliations with the Environmental Markets Lab, Climate Impact Lab, Center for Effective Global Action, National Academies of Sciences Environmental Health Matters Initiative, Beijer Young Scholars, and National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research combines economics with remote sensing and climate science to study climate change, water scarcity, and health impacts. She earned a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from UC Berkeley, MSc degrees from the University of Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and a BA from Lewis & Clark College.

Research Interests: Climate adaptation feedbacks, environmental policy, water resource management, agricultural sustainability, mental health impacts of climate change, and remote sensing applications in socioenvironmental systems. Her work emphasizes large geospatial datasets to analyze how environmental changes interact with economic development.

Recent Publications: Focus on climate adaptation feedback mechanisms, air quality and mental health linkages, water scarcity projections, and econometric methods for climate impact analysis. Her 2025 paper in Nature Communications quantifies energy-based climate feedback, while 2024 publications address freshwater availability and suicide rate declines linked to air quality improvements in China.

Awards & Recognition: EPA STAR Fellowship, Doctoral Fellow at the Global Policy Lab, and Rhodes Scholarship. Her work is supported by grants from Wellcome Trust, NSF, and other institutions.

Teaching & Mentorship: Taught EDS 222: Statistics for Environmental Data Science at UCSB Bren School. Active in advising graduate students on climate impacts research. Develops open-source tools like the stagg R package for climate data preprocessing.

Labs & Initiatives: Leads research in the Climate Impact Lab and collaborates with interdisciplinary teams on projects like MOSAIKS satellite imagery analysis framework and the Global Commission on Economics of Water.