Investment and adaptation as commitment devices in climate politics

Clemens Heuson (), Wolfgang Peters, Reimund Schwarze and Anna-Katharina Topp

No 13/2013, UFZ Discussion Papers from Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Division of Social Sciences (ÖKUS)

Abstract: It is well established that adaptation and technological investment in each case may serve as a commitment device in international climate politics. This paper for the first time analyzes the combined impact of these two strategic variables on global mitigation within a noncooperative framework where countries either decide on mitigation before or after adaptation. By investment, which is assumed to be made in the first place due to its considerable lead time, countries commit to lower national contributions to the global public good of mitigation. We find that the sequencing of adaptation before mitigation reinforces this strategic effect of technological investments at least for sufficiently similar countries. As a consequence, the subgame-perfect equilibrium yields a globally lower level of mitigation and higher global costs of climate change when adaptation is decided before mitigation. Besides this theoretical contribution, the paper proposes some strategies to combat the unfortunate rush to adaptation which can be currently observed in climate politics.

Keywords: adaptation; climate policy; investment; mitigation; non-cooperative behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 H41 H87 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/85254/1/770509207.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Investment and Adaptation as Commitment Devices in Climate Politics (2015)
Working Paper: Investment and Adaptation as Commitment Devices in Climate Politics (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ufzdps:132013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UFZ Discussion Papers from Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Division of Social Sciences (ÖKUS) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().