Catastrophic Risk, Precautionary Abatement, and Adaptation Transfers
Francesco Bosello,
Enrica De Cian () and
Licia Ferranna
Additional contact information
Licia Ferranna: Cà Foscari University of Venice and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)
No 2014.108, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei
Abstract:
This paper contributes to the normative literature on mitigation and adaptation by framing the question of their optimal policy balance in the context of catastrophic climate risk. The analysis uses the WITCH integrated assessment model with a module that models the endogenous risk of experiencing an economic catastrophe if temperature increases above a certain threshold. We find that the risk of a catastrophic outcome would encourage countries to reduce emissions even in the absence of a coordinated global agreement on climate change and to realign the policy balance from adaptation toward more mitigation. Our analysis also shows that adaptation transfers from and strategic unilateral commitments to adaptation in developed countries appear to provide weak incentives for reducing emissions in developing countries. Thus our first conclusion is that precautionary considerations, rather than the ability to reduce smooth damage increases, justify mitigation as a fundamental policy option. Accordingly, adaptation is needed to cope with the non-catastrophic damages that countries would fail to address with mitigation Our second conclusion is that supporting adaptation in developing countries should be considered primarily as a mean for ensuring equity or improving development, and very marginally as a mitigation incentive.
Keywords: Climate Change; Mitigation; Adaptation; Climate Risk; Integrated Assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 D58 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/w ... oads/NDL2014-108.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Catastrophic Risk, Precautionary Abatement, and Adaptation Transfers (2015) 
Working Paper: Catastrophic Risk, Precautionary Abatement, and Adaptation Transfers (2015) 
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:fem:femwpa:2014.108
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).