Universal Metrics for Climate Change Adaptation Finance? A Cautionary Tale

Andrea Klonschinski
Additional contact information
Andrea Klonschinski: Faculty of Philosophy, Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, 24118 Kiel, Germany

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-14

Abstract: Climate change adaptation is receiving ever more attention in the literature and in practice. Since available funds are not meeting adaptation needs, the question of how to allocate scarce resources becomes pressing. Universal adaptation metrics promise to facilitate the allocation process ex ante and the evaluation of projects ex post. Two such metrics have been proposed recently: Saved Wealth (SW), measured in terms of money, and Saved Health (SH), gauged in terms of disability adjusted life-years (DALYs). The paper analyzes this SWSH approach and shows that it is replete with unresolved conceptual and normative-ethical problems, which are exemplary for universal metrics seeking to combine concerns for equity and efficiency at once. The paper’s aim is to uncover these issues, and its conclusion is modest: universal metrics such as SW and the DALY have to be designed and used with great caution and further research is necessary.

Keywords: climate change adaptation; resource allocation; efficiency; equity; health; DALY (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9428/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9428/ (text/html)

Related works:
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:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:16:p:9428-:d:619561

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().