Conference Agenda

As countries and populations become increasingly vulnerable to rising climate risks and catastrophes, building adaptive capacity and resilience is essential to sustaining long-run welfare. Climate-related hazards, such as floods, droughts, cyclones and heat waves, threaten progress on socio-economic development in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). This paper assesses and compares whether LMICs are making progress towards key social and economic development goals while at the same time building sufficient capacity for climate change adaptation and resilience. By developing and employing a compensating surplus welfare framework, we estimate the net per capita welfare gains (in dollars) for 108 LMICs from 2000 to 2024 associated with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1-7 and with a country’s economic, social and governance “readiness” to adapt to climate change. We also examine the rate of convergence of welfare among LMICs over this period. The results show that deteriorating climate readiness impacted significantly the net overall per capita welfare of developing countries over 2000-24. Poorer LMICs generally experienced declining readiness, which not only affected their welfare but also slowed their rate of convergence toward the per capita welfare levels of richer LMICs. Our analysis helps identify effective and efficient ways to channel adaptation funding to boost the climate readiness and economic development of LMICs, making an important contribution to policies on climate change adaptation and resilience.

This paper tests whether the inclusion of an environmental attitudinal battery is a neutral survey component or a consequential design choice that can causally alter welfare estimates in environmental choice experiments. We embed a randomized split-sample experiment in a choice experiment on climate-mitigation measures implemented by accommodation establishments in Mallorca (Spain). Tourists were randomly assigned to a questionnaire in which an environmental attitudinal battery was administered either before or after the choice tasks. Preferences are estimated with panel random-parameters logit models allowing for heteroskedastic scale, and welfare is summarized through distributions of marginal willingness to pay (WTP). Making attitudes salient before the choice experiment produces a large downward shift in welfare estimates: mean WTP for all mitigation attributes in the “attitudes-before” condition is 75–90% lower than in the “attitudes-after” condition. A set of auxiliary checks indicates that the effect is not driven by sample composition, differential task exposure, or respondent fatigue, and is instead consistent with a measurement-induced framing/priming mechanism that changes how respondents construct valuations. The findings imply that attitudinal batteries are not innocuous add-ons: question order can materially affect WTP and compromise comparability across studies and policy appraisals when attitudinal constructs are integrated into CE designs. We therefore recommend that researchers explicitly report and justify attitudinal-block placement and, where feasible, treat question order as a design sensitivity in welfare reporting.

This paper studies voluntary demand-side climate transitions in a taste-heterogeneous brown--green economy. We compare two shocks that both reduce demand for carbon-intensive goods in partial equilibrium: a green-preference shock, interpreted as sufficiency, and a carbon tax. The two shocks are not equivalent in general equilibrium. A carbon tax creates a wedge between the consumer and producer prices of the brown good; a preference shock shifts demand directly and works through the endogenous relative brown producer price. With heterogeneous households, the key sufficient statistic for distributional incidence is the difference between each household's exposure to brown consumption and its exposure to brown labor income. Producer price effects redistribute real income according to this gap. In the aggregate, these effects cancel by clearing of the brown goods market. The tax shock therefore generates an aggregate first-order real income and welfare loss equal to the tax wedge on brown consumption, whereas a pure preference shock generates no first-order aggregate fixed preference welfare loss. We show, however, that measured aggregate real income may rise or fall after a preference shock because it contains a preference revaluation term. We characterize rebound, welfare, effectiveness, and illustrate the mechanisms in a five-type calibration.

Effective climate mitigation requires policy interventions such as pricing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, public resistance, especially toward tax-based measures, limits political action. While prior research highlights factors shaping climate-policy support, it often overlooks systematic differences across ideological groups. This study investigates how political ideology and partisan framing influence support for climate policies in Sweden. Using a survey experiment with frames derived from real political debates and party manifestos, we test whether ideologically congruent messaging increases support for policy packages or specific design features. We find ideological differences in baseline support, with left-leaning voters more supportive overall. However, congruent frames do not raise support; instead, a left-green framing reduces support of left leaning voters relative to a neutral frame, suggesting reactance or backlash. Left-leaning voters also adjust their preferences for policy design features in response to framing, whereas right-leaning voters remain largely unaffected. These findings underscore that framing can inadvertently repel key voter segments, with important implications for climate-policy communication and design.