Conference Agenda

In rural and peri-urban areas of Central America, community water organizations (CWOs) provide water to 60% of the population, thereby playing a pivotal role in achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals. The underlying environmental, climatic, and institutional factors explaining these water providers' adoption of volumetric pricing and its effect on service delivery are typically overlooked in the literature. In this paper, we address two issues. First, we test whether volumetric pricing affects the service water delivery in a rural setting, drawing on a random sample of cross-sectional data on 154 CWOs in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. We find that volumetric pricing is associated with substantially more successful water delivery, even when conditioned on institutional capacity, environmental attributes, climatic conditions, and country-fixed effects. Despite this strong relationship, volumetric pricing has yet to be widely adopted, particularly in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Therefore, as the second goal, we try to identify the institutional and socio-ecological conditions in which volumetric pricing is implemented. We find that volumetric pricing is more likely used when communities (1) experience adverse environmental and climatic conditions associated with water scarcity and (2) have greater institutional capacity. Our results highlight the importance of examining the social-ecological system to assess the performance and emergence of water management institutions.

The extent to which changes in labour force outcomes can be attributed to historic climate change is currently unknown. Here, we combine robust estimates of the impact of climatic stressors on labour supply, labour productivity, and a combined metric of the two - effective labour, with novel historic climate forcing data to quantify the effect of historic climate change on labour. We do this at the global and regional level, taking explicit account of heterogeneity of working conditions. Globally, effective labour in outdoor working conditions was 1.8 percentage points lower in 1901-2019 than it would have been without climate change. The attributable declines have increased over time, rising to 3.6 percentage points between 2001 and 2019. The highest declines have been in the relatively lower-income regions of Western Africa, South-Eastern Asia, and Middle Africa. We also estimate the economic effects through impacts on GDP and find up to a 9\% GDP loss for some regions. Our findings can help improve the design of better labour protections, improve worker health, enhance productivity and economic growth, and inform better climate adaptation and resilience.

Using disaggregated data at the municipality level, this study is the first to examine the relationship between income per capita and PM2.5 concentration for Italy in the years of 2011 and 2019. Contrary to previous research on environmental justice, I find a positive unconditional correlation between PM2.5 levels and per capita income across municipalities. That is: a 1% increase in wealth is associated with a 0.448% increase in 2011 PM2.5 and 0.374% in 2019, thus there is not an unconditional environmental justice gap in Italy. However, as the original aspect of my study is to explore the role of agglomerations and geographical factors affecting the pollution dispersion capacity of regions, controlling for agglomerations and morphological

features weakens the positive correlations between PM2.5 and income per capita.

When attempting to disentangle the pollution variation among municipalities within the same province, a negative correlation between income per capita and pollution is discovered. The findings indicate the existence of environmental inequalities within provinces, where wealthier municipalities are correlated with lower levels of pollution, which remain stable over time.

Specifically, an increase of 1% in per capita income in municipalities correlates with a reduction in pollution by -0.08% in 2011 and -0.05% in 2019. In other terms, an increase of one standard deviation in income pc (2970 Euros) is associated with an average decrease in PM2.5 concentration of 0.4 mg/m^3 in 2011 and 0.17 mg/m^3 in 2019. These findings illustrate the existence of an environmental justice gap within provinces conditional on land characteristics and the location of agglomerations.

Given their unexpected and destructive nature, natural disasters have the potential to cause profound shocks to communities and jurisdictions across all governmental levels. With regard to the connection between natural catastrophes and their financial impact, this study seeks to refocus national and subnational research efforts. The consequences of natural disasters on the budget and economy at the subnational government level in India are experimentally examined in this study. However, the study creates a physical disaster intensity index to evaluate the impact on fiscal sustainability after catastrophes because the state-level estimated damages statistics are unreliable. Between 1995 and 2018, the study integrated disaster intensity index and fiscal data to produce a panel dataset of 25 Indian states. Using Panel Vector Autoregression, the study discovers that a state's overall government expenditure goes up, and its budget deficit worsens when a natural disaster strikes. The study further breaks up the fiscal variables for a more in-depth and focused investigation. These results validate the results of aggregate fiscal variables. By scrutinizing the detailed components, we were able to pinpoint specific areas where disasters have exerted their influence, especially in terms of decreased own tax revenue, increased social sector expenditure and capital outlay, increased outstanding liability, increased primary deficit, and decreased transfers from the center over time. The study highlights that state governments rely highly on ex-post DRF instruments, especially debt financing, as SDRF and NDRF couldn’t manage the increased spending and budget deficit from disasters. This study thus helps policymakers and governments to look for more proactive disaster financing instruments and make changes in the fiscal framework of India to integrate climate change considerations.

Variable renewable energy droughts (`Dunkelflauten') are persistent periods with low availability of variable renewable energy sources, such as wind power and solar photovoltaic. They challenge the continuity of the supply of energy systems with high renewable shares. Long-duration energy storage provides system flexibility to cope with the energy deficit during these events. This paper analyzes the impact of renewable energy drought events on a fully renewable European power sector, applying a novel identification tool of historical drought patterns and an open-source power sector model. Due to their spatial extent, droughts affect investment and operation decisions of long-duration storage assets across many countries simultaneously. Series of short, yet severe, drought events may cause steep storage discharge ramps, driving optimal storage energy capacity investments.

Tourism is one of the most climate-sensitive and weather-dependent sectors. Within

the tourism system, tourists have the greatest capacity for adaptation because of

their flexibility to substitute the place, timing and type of holiday. This study aims

to quantify the temporal and regional displacements of tourism demand due to cli-

mate change, focusing on the case of France. Using a monthly panel dataset at the

establishment level, we estimate the contemporaneous non-linear impact of temper-

ature on both domestic and foreign tourism demand and reveal for the first time

an inverse U-shape. Following which, we employ warm and cold day variables to

characterize extremes in climate distribution as our main dependent variables. Our

findings reveal highly heterogeneous effects across months and tourist areas. We

establish that tourism demand decreases in response to a lack of cold days rather

than to an increase in warm days during the peak summer season, with southern

littoral areas being the most affected, and document an extension of the summer

season into autumn. Finally, we compare the contemporaneous estimates to dy-

namic causal effects, leveraging a distributed lag model. A right shift in the local

climate distribution leads to a permanent decrease in campsites occupancy.

Solar and wind energy are the two pillars of the energy transition in Germany. In addition to national law, the federal state of Bavaria has set ambitious targets requiring an accelerated expansion of renewable energy supply. However, with the introduction of a strict minimum distance regulation for wind turbines (10H rule), the expansion of wind energy has come to a standstill in Bavaria. At the same time, Bavaria offers favorable conditions for solar energy. To assess the interacting impact of wind energy regulation on solar expansion we i) conduct and analyse expert interviews on the relation between , ii) We run an empirical analysis using a difference-in-difference model combined with a matching algorithm. Even when controlling for influencing factors, the empirical results contradict the expert expectations and suggest a negative impact of the 10H rule on the expansion of solar energy in Bavaria at the district level.