【AEW Webinar】Adaptation to Climate Change

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• 研討會日期 : 2025-10-30
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor B. Kelsey Jack
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor B. Kelsey Jack received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University in 2010. She is currently an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of environmental and development economics, with a focus on how individuals, households, and communities decide to use natural resources and provide public goods.
• 演講摘要 : Mounting costs of anthropogenic climate change reveal that adaptation will be essential to human well-being in coming decades. At the same time, the literature on the economics of adaptation offers relatively little guidance for emerging policy. In this chapter, we review the existing literature, focusing on how it can better inform adaptation policy design and implementation. A simple conceptual model of adaptation decision-making describes two core adaptation channels that we link to two streams of adaptation literature, which have emerged largely in parallel. We outline how insights from these literatures can be used for adaptation policy evaluation, highlight key limitations of and opportunities for public intervention in private adaptation markets, and provide guidance for future work.
• Working Paper Title : Can the Urban Poor Avoid Flood Risks? The Case of Cape Town, South Africa
• Working Paper Speaker : Professor Thomas Monnier
• Working Paper Biography : Professor Thomas Monnier received his Ph.D. in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique - IP Paris in 2025. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are Urban, Development, Labor, and Environmental Economics.
• Working Paper Abstract : In low- and middle-income country cities, poor households often reside in unattractive locations, including flood-prone areas. This can be due to poor information about flood risks or acceptance of these risks in the face of lower housing prices. Poor households are also more vulnerable to floods than richer households given the low-quality housing they occupy. Does information on flood risks help households make better location and housing choices? To what extent will these choices be revised with increased flood risks from climate change? To answer these questions, we develop a polycentric urban economics model with heterogenous income groups, formal and informal housing, and flood risks. The model is calibrated to Cape Town (South Africa) and simulations are run to assess the impact of flood risks on land values and income segregation within the city, distinguishing between the effects of three types of floods (fluvial, pluvial, and coastal). Although total damages from floods are greater for rich households, they represent a larger relative share of poor households’ incomes. Better information encourage the adaptation of poor households up to a certain point, and this allows them to mitigate most of the adverse consequences from climate change. Considering the different nature of flood types is key to understand their responses.