Conference Agenda

Nigeria experienced severe flooding during the rainy season of 2012 which cost $17 billion USD in macro-economic terms. This paper examines the local impacts of the flood on livelihoods, which can be severe but are often overlooked in aggregate statistics. Combining panel household survey data before and after the flood with satellite imagery, we provide evidence on the exposure, vulnerability, and ability to respond of households to better understand flood risk at the local level in a sub-Saharan African context. This paper employs multiple modalities of measuring exposure to isolate the causal impact of the flood and uncover local spillovers and interactions with market factors. On average, we find affected farmers lost around 20% of crop production and 50% of value. Additionally, impacts depend on the interaction between the individual and area-level measures of flood exposure. While farmers who live in a flooded area and directly experience the flood lose half their crop value, those in flooded areas but not directly affected experience increases in crop value by around 30%, which is related to food price increases. we also find that households living outside of historically flooded zones experience more severe impacts. In terms of household responses, we do not find evidence of consumption or livestock changes for the full sample, but poor affected households do experience drops in consumption and livestock value. The findings of this paper provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the local impacts of floods in sub-Saharan Africa and can help inform disaster risk management strategies in an era of increasing risk due to climate change.

This article assesses the impact of weather variations on France’s agricultural sector over the period 1980 to 2023, employing recent local projection and pseudo-panel local projection frameworks at a sub-national level. It highlights the detrimental effects of increasing temperatures on the value added of the agricultural sector and underscores an important north-south divide. Moreover, the article also stresses the importance of an estimation method that goes beyond conventional panel studies, in particular by decomposing weather variables. It further explores the significance of adopting a pseudo-panel local projection specification in analyzing these relationships, contributing new insights to the literature and informing region-specific policy interventions.

Climate change has already led to a global temperature increase of 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, with visible and quantifiable impacts. Despite uncertainties about future climate scenarios, the global climate will continue to change, leading to economic losses. Traditionally, the macroeconomic impact of climate change has been modeled using damage functions based on the relationship between temperature and GDP. This paper reviews the literature on the economic impacts of different types of climate damage, focusing on the EU. Nine types of climate impacts were selected for analysis, including coastal and river flooding, labor productivity, drought, and agricultural production. The results show significant variability in economic impacts across different types of damage and between EU Member States, with Southern countries like Greece expected to face severe impacts from drought, while Northern countries like Sweden may see minimal effects. In the next step, the paper estimates damage functions for each type of damage and EU Member State, testing various functional forms and incorporating mixed effects. The study also scores the quality of these estimates and presents a set of damage functions at the EU and national levels. While using global temperature changes as the sole explanatory variable simplifies the analysis, it limits the precision of local impact assessments. However, this approach aims to make the damage functions more accessible for researchers and policymakers in the EU.

We stress-test sovereign debt sustainability under climate change. We link a coupled climate-economy model with stochastic debt sustainability analysis optimization to project debt trajectories for the century. We combine narrative scenarios of socioeconomic and climate pathways with calibrated aleatory scenario trees of financial, economic, and fiscal variables to account for future growth under damages from climate change. We test representative countries from different continents under climate impact functions spanning the full spectrum of impacts estimated from the climate economics literature. We find significant effects, especially under high-impact scenarios. We also test whether adaptation or fiscal consolidation can help avert a climate-debt crisis. Public financing of reactive adaptation can have a positive impact on debt sustainability, justifying its cost. Maintaining constant public spending with sustainable debt levels appears not feasible under climate impacts.