Asia

There is concern that climate change may greatly increase the costs of providing water infrastructure in rich countries, but the estimates available cannot be compared across countries. This paper develops and applies a top-down approach to estimate the costs of adapting to climate change on a consistent basis for different climate scenarios. The analysis separates (a) the costs of maintaining service standards for a baseline projection of demand, and (b) the costs of changes in water use and infrastructure as a consequence of changes in climate patterns.

This paper focuses on the adaptation strategies of developing countries and the possible adaptation options available for Southeast Asia. Adaptation refers to the actions taken by individuals, communities, or governments in response to climate change, to reduce the adverse impacts or to take advantage of opportunities offered by such changes. Adaptation strategies have hardly been considered by many Southeast Asian countries in as recently as two or three years ago.

This paper reviews the literature on the relationship between climate and the energy sector. In particular,we primarily discuss empirical papers published in peer-reviewed economics journals focusing on how climate affects energy expenditures and consumption. Climate will affect energy consumption by changing how consumers respond to short run weather shocks (the intensive margin) as well as how people will adapt in the long run (the extensivemargin).

Neither the costs nor the benefits of adaptation to climate change have been systematically studied so far. This paper discusses the extent to which the vast body of literature on climate change impacts can provide insights into the scope and likely cost of adaptation. The ways in which the impacts literature deals with adaptation can be grouped into four categories: no adaptation, arbitrary adaptation, observed adaptation (analogues), and modeled adaptation (optimization). All four cases are characterized by the simple assumptions made about the mechanisms of adaptation.

This paper reviews the empirical and theoretical literature on economic growth to examine how the four components of the climate change bill, namely mitigation, proactive (ex ante) adaptation, reactive (ex post) adaptation, and ultimate damages of climate change affect growth, especially in developing countries. The authors consider successively the Cass-Koopmans growth model and three major strands of the subsequent literature on growth: with multiple sectors, with rigidities, and with increasing returns.

Although climate policies have been so far mostly focused on mitigation, adaptation to climate change is a growing concern in developed and developing countries. This paper discusses how adaptation fits into the global climate strategy, at the global and national levels. To do so, a partial equilibrium optimization model of climate policies—which includes mitigation, proactive adaptation (ex ante), and reactive adaptation (ex post)—is solved without and with uncertainty. Mitigation, proactive adaptation, and reactive adaptation are found to be generally jointly determined.

Managing risks from extreme events will be a crucial component of climate change adaptation. In this study, we demonstrate an approach to assess future risks and quantify the benefits of adaptation options at a city-scale, with application to flood risk in Mumbai.

This work illustrates the preliminary findings of a participatory research process aimed at identifying responses for sustainable water management in a climate change perspective, in two river basins in Europe and Asia. The paper describes the methodology implemented through local workshops, aimed at eliciting and evaluating possible responses to flooding risk. Participatory workshops allowed for the identification of four categories of possible responses and a set of nine evaluation criteria, three for each of the three pillars of sustainable development.

In this study we test empirically the hypothesis that also in a growth-oriented economy like China non-materialistic values like the nonuse values of climate policy are perceived and respected by the population. This should especially hold for the better educated people living in big cities like Beijing. Therefore, we conduct a survey in Beijing where we ask people to assess a climate change adaptation project to be implemented in a faraway region, in this case in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang.

Linking tropical cyclone activity with anthropogenic climate change is subject to on-going debate. However, modelling studies consistently have projected that climate change is likely to increase the intensity of cyclones and the related rainfall rates in the future. A precautionary approach to this possibility is to adapt to the adverse effects of the changing climate by improving early warning services for cyclones as a ‘no or low-regrets’ option. Given limited funding resources, assessments of economic efficiency will be necessary, and values for benefits are an essential input.