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Yichun Fan has joined the Nicholas School of the Environment as assistant professor of climate economics in environmental social systems, within the Division of Environmental Social Systems. She studies the costs and benefits of improving urban resilience to environmental risks, particularly those associated with climate change.

Fan’s interest in urban environmental hazards stems from her childhood in Beijing. Biking to and from school in winter meant wearing a face mask as protection from air pollution, . 

“At that time, the air quality was so bad. I always felt like my throat hurt, and the visibility was very poor,” Fan says, noting that air quality in China has since improved in recent years.

After graduating from Beijing’s Tsinghua University with a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering, Fan earned a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in urban economics, with a focus on climate resilience.

Fan’s early research examined connections between air pollution and physical exercise in China. In a study published last year in the , Fan reported that Chinese residents were 28% less likely to exercise outdoors on days with heavy air pollution. Residents in well-educated neighborhoods were more than twice as likely to heed air pollution warnings, likely due to greater awareness of the associated health risks. Although this behavior reduces exposure to air pollution, it could lead to negative health consequences stemming from lack of exercise, Fan noted.

“I’m always trying to think about how to quantify the lifestyle costs of environmental risk that affect many of us,” she says.

For her dissertation, Fan investigated the relationship between climate resilience finance and housing market dynamics. A investigated how levee failures are linked to housing markets and local investment in flood-protection infrastructure. For that work, Fan built the first national database of levee system failure across the U.S.

“In a nutshell, what I found is that lower-income communities with lower housing value and lower property tax revenue have limited capacity to properly maintain their flood protection infrastructure,” Fan explains. Failing infrastructure, in turn, further decreases housing values in these areas, creating a feedback loop, she says. 

Fan is building on this work at Duke, driven by the question, “How do we better value and finance climate resilience infrastructure?”

Historically, cost-benefit analyses of resilience infrastructure emphasize the avoided damages of protected properties, according to Fan. But “when you invest in flood protection levees or other climate resilience infrastructure, you also encourage housing price increases and new real estate development in the protected-but-still-risky area,” she says. In other words, more is at stake if protective infrastructure does fail.

Fan is exploring ways to model the behavioral dynamics of real estate and resilience investing, in collaboration with Martin Smith, the George M. Woodwell Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics at the Nicholas School. These dynamics can substantially alter economic impact assessments and, in turn, influence decisions about where and how to invest in housing and protective infrastructure, she says.  

Fan is also working with colleagues in other fields, including Lydia Olander, an adjunct professor at the Nicholas School and program director at the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment & Sustainability (NIEES); Mark Borsuk, associate professor at the Nicholas School and the James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering; and Victoria Salinas, a Duke Climate Leader in Residence with the Nicholas School and NIEES and former deputy administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Together they’re exploring ways to develop a tool for decision makers who want to learn about climate resilience investment opportunities, costs and outcomes in a given locale. The tool would be publicly available and customizable to a municipality’s unique economic situation.

“It would be designed to help communities make more informed resilience decisions while also opening new opportunities for private capital, given the direct links between resilience, insurance and debt markets,” Fan explains.

As her work progresses, Fan envisions additional partnerships with policy makers and practitioners in industry.

“To address climate resilience, you need someone who can model hydrology, someone who can assess the performance of resilience infrastructure, and someone who has the economics and finance skills to value its impacts,” she says. “I think we have a perfect interdisciplinary collaboration environment at Duke, and I think we can do a lot of cool things through these connections.”