Conference Agenda

One of the many secondary effects of climate change, beach erosion, is a growing problem worldwide. Several engineering solutions have been proposed to ameliorate the threat to coastlines, including ‘soft’ measures (e.g., beach nourishment) and ‘hard’ measures (e.g., seawalls and jetties); however, preferences for these alternative interventions have been shown to vary by location and user. La Paloma, Uruguay, is one such location that has begun to experience the damaging effects of beach erosion. While the local government has invested in technical assessments of several adaptation measures, the residents’ preferences and perspectives have not yet been considered. We conduct a choice experiment survey of La Paloma residents to identify their rank ordered preferences for management interventions including seawalls, jetties in a T or I formation, and beach nourishment as financed by an increase in annual property taxes. Moreover, we consider the role of the governing body overseeing the administration of the coastal management program, soliciting preferences for an interinstitutional committee relative to the departmental government or the Ministry of the Environment. Our results show that the average respondent would be willing to pay an additional $34 USD in property taxes to support beach nourishment, and nearly double that value, $61, for seawalls. In contrast, residents would reject the implementation of jetties in any formation. Additionally, we find residents rank the management by the Ministry of Environment first, over the Interinstitutional committee, and lastly the departmental government. Of note, 53.1% of respondents consistently chose the status quo option, rejecting all intervention types. The serial status quo responses are positively related to age, income and perceived consequentiality of the survey on tax policies. Overall, our results suggest that there is a division between residents over whether the government should intervene with any management strategy.

The paper reviews the literature on the effects of air conditioning (AC) in reducing mortality and morbidity as a result of increased extreme heat and reports estimates of gains from autonomous AC across Europe in these areas. It then looks at the potential in Spain for encouraging adoption of AC by the use of subsidies and evaluates the costs and benefits of such subsidies. The scope for adoption in a way that has positive net benefits depends on the underlying parameters, particularly VSL/VOLY. The figures suggest AC could play a useful role but fiscal costs are high. Other methods will be needed to reduce the health costs of extreme heat in the coming decades in Europe.

Extreme weather events, intensified by climate change, have increasingly disrupted economies, underscoring the urgent need to understand how physical climate risks affect local financing costs. This paper examines the impact of extreme rainfall risk on local financing costs using county-level precipitation data and urban investment bonds in China. Our results reveal that a one-day increase in the frequency of extreme rainfall in the previous year raises bond spreads by approximately 4 basis points. We identify economic losses, media coverage, and flight delays as macro-level mechanisms and find that market participants are more sensitive than local governments to climate risks, reflecting differing levels of climate change awareness. While adaptation bonds effectively reduce the negative impact of extreme rainfall on financing costs, we find no evidence that extreme rainfall risk affects local bond issuance behavior, further supporting the conclusion that market mechanisms dominate. This study advances the literature by clarifying how climate risks are priced in bond markets and by emphasizing the critical role of adaptive financial instruments in managing physical climate risks.

We provide the first evidence on the link between temperature and road violations, the most common and observable rule-breaking behavior, and the associated accidents. Using the administrative violation and accident records and high-resolution atmospheric data in Taiwan, we find that high temperature increases road violations and accidents with casualties. The adverse impacts of high temperature are significantly stronger among more socio-economically disadvantaged drivers, indicating that the health costs of temperature extremes are disproportionately borne by those economically marginalized and that the warming climate is making the financial penalties even more regressive.