The Impact of Climate Disasters on Climate Action: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Western Europe

Giorgos Galanis, Giorgio Ricchiuti and Ben Tippet

Working Papers - Economics from Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa

Abstract: Unexpected climate disasters have been shown to increase public concern for tackling climate change, but not change the attitudes of policy makers. This raises the question of what the overall impact of climate disasters are on mitigation laws and policies? This paper utilises a natural experiment to estimate the impact of extreme and unexpected disaster shocks on mitigation laws and policies for 17 Western European countries. Over the period from 1980 to 2020, we identify 1990 as a particularly extreme year of climate shocks for some countries in Western Europe. Using a simple difference in difference estimation, we show that these countries which experienced the extreme climate disaster shock in 1990 implemented less mitigation laws relative to the control group over the next 10 years. This suggests that while disasters may increase public concern for the environment, they do not necessarily translate into more mitigation laws.

Keywords: Climate Risk; Climate Disasters; Natural Experiment; Environmental Laws (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C9 Q54 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:frz:wpaper:wp2025_10.rdf

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