Climate Change Adaptation Strategies—An Upstream-Downstream Perspective

Upstream versus Downstream Implementation of Climate Policy

This chapter examines the tradeoffs of regulating upstream (e.g., coal, natural gas, and refined petroleum product producers) versus regulating downstream (e.g., direct sources of greenhouse gases (GHG)). In general, regulating at the source provides polluters with incentives to choose among more opportunities to abate pollution. This chapter develops a simple theoretical model that shows why t...

Synergisms between climate change mitigation and adaptation: an insurance perspective

As the world’s largest industry, the insurance sector is both an aggregator of the impacts of climate change and a market actor able to play a material role in decreasing the vulnerability of human and natural systems. This article reviews the implications of climate change for insurers and provides specific examples of insurance-relevant synergisms between adaptation and mitigation in the buil...

Adaptation to Climate Change

We investigate the effect of climate change on population growth in 18th and 19th century Iceland. We find that annual temperature changes help determine the population growth rate in preindustrial Iceland: a year 1◦C cooler than average drives down population growth rates by 0.57% in each of the next two years, for a total effect of 1.14%. We also find that 18th and 19th century Icelanders ada...

Climate Change and Adaptation

Financing climate change adaptation.

This paper examines the topic of financing adaptation in future climate change policies. A major question is whether adaptation in developing countries should be financed under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or whether funding should come from other sources. We present an overview of financial resources and propose the employment of a two-track approach...