Climate Policy Must Favour Mitigation Over Adaptation
Résumé
In climate change policy, adaptation tends to be viewed as being
as important as mitigation. In this article we present a simple yet general
argument for which mitigation must be preferred to adaptation.
The argument rests on the observation that mitigation is a public good
while adaptation is a private one. This implies that the more one disaggregates
the units in a social welfare function, i.e. the more one teases
out the public good nature of mitigation, the lower is average income
and thus less money (per region, country or individual) is available for
adaptation and mitigation. We show that, while this reduces incentives
to invest in the private good adaptation, it increases incentives
to invest in the public good mitigation since even small contributions
of everyone can have significant impacts at the large. Conclusively,
private adaptation thus must be viewed as a significant loss to global
welfare. When taking this result to the data we find that a representative
policy maker who relies on world-aggregated data would invest in
both adaptation and mitigation, just as the previous literature recommends.
However, a representative policy maker who relies on countrylevel
data, or data at further levels of disaggregation, would optimally
only invest in mitigation.
Domaines
Etudes de l'environnement
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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