Journal
CLIMATE CHANGE ECONOMICS
Volume 3, Issue 2, Pages -Publisher
WORLD SCIENTIFIC PUBL CO PTE LTD
DOI: 10.1142/S201000781250011X
Keywords
Adaptation to climate change; hurricanes; natural disasters; risk; cost of climate change
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Funding
- Center for International Business Education and Research at Columbia University
- Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results [FP-916932]
- Applied Econometrics at the National Bureau of Economic Research
- German Research Foundation through the Future Ocean Cluster of Excellence
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
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Understanding the feasibility and cost of adaptation is essential to management of the global climate. Unfortunately, we lack general estimates of adaptive responses to almost all climatological processes. To address this for one phenomenon, we estimate the extent of adaptation to tropical cyclones (TCs) using the global cross-section of countries. We reconstruct every TC observed during 1950-2008 to parameterize countries' TC climate and year-to-year TC exposure. We then look for evidence of adaptation by comparing deaths and damages from physically similar TC events across countries with different TC climatologies. We find that countries with more intense TC climates suffer lower marginal losses from an actual TC event, indicating that adaptation to this climatological risk occurs but that it is costly. Overall, there is strong evidence that it is both feasible and cost-effective for countries with intense TC climatologies to invest heavily in adaptation. However, marginal changes from countries' current TC climates generate persistent losses, of which only similar to 3% is adapted away in the long run.
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