Economics of Adaptation
Climate Finance, Green Growth and Shared Prosperity: Reconsidering Climate-related Institutions, Investments and Priorities in Nepal
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tek Jung Mahat
Nepal, a least developed, mountainous and land-locked country is consistently ranked as one of the most vulnerable countries to the climate change. Poor socio-economic development, rough and highly unstable geography, inadequate institutional capacity to deal with research, development and policy and mostly underdeveloped infrastructures, all have contributed to increasing vulnerability of communities and ecosystems, and have limited their adaptive capacity. Over past decade, Nepal has made significant progress in some of these areas, particularly in developing and implementing policies and frameworks, and establishing institutional mechanisms with the support of donor countries, UN and multilateral agencies, and will continue to access technologies and financial resources for next level actions, i.e. climate-proof and resilient socio-economic development. As the global climate politics is getting much more complicated, international financing patterns – both climate and development finance - are shifting their ways, forcing the countries like Nepal to diversify the funding base for climate change actions and integrate them within national development plans and strategies. In this paper, using the data and information currently available, we analyse the existing financing situations, discuss the future scenarios and suggest policy recommendations to develop a set of long-term adaptation and impact mitigation strategies in specific and environmental change at large. When short-term adaptation strategies funded from existing financial arrangements seem to be encouraging, we stress the need of “public-private partnership driven full-fledged green economy” focusing on renewable energy and transport, agriculture and forestry, water and water-induced disasters, as well as tourism and hospitality.
Econometric Evaluation of Extreme Weather and Climate Events in Atlantic Canada
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yuri Yevdokimov
In recent years Atlantic Canada has seen many examples of extreme weather and climate events such as floods, hurricanes, thunderstorms, severe rainfalls and snowstorms, storm surges, heat waves and others. These extreme weather events resulted in significant economic damage which has affected lives of people in the region as well as public finances. The existing literature on extreme weather and climate events claims that frequency and magnitude of these events are going to increase in the future due to changing climate. In this regard, this study address two issues - establishing the link between climate change and extreme weather events on the one hand and evaluating economic damage from those events on the other – by means of a rigorous statistical analysis. The relationship between frequencies of floods, hurricanes, heavy rainfalls and snowstorms and climate variables such as temperature, precipitation and sea level is established on the basis of log-log complimentary model and Poisson regressions. Other specific factors associated with each extreme weather event are used as control variables. Our estimation on the basis of these statistical methods has shown a strong and statistically significant positive correlation between frequencies of the above mentioned extreme weather events and climate variables which proves the link between frequencies of these events and climate change in Atlantic Canada. These results are the basis for estimation of the so-called damage functions associated with extreme weather events in Atlantic Canada that will provide economic justification for the investments into preventive and mitigation measures in the region.
Public Financing of Intermodal Transport to Reduce GHG Emissions: Challenges Underestimated by Public Decision Makers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Talbot, Olivier Boiral
In 2013, the Government of Quebec (Canada) set up a carbon market (QC ETS) under the Western Climate Initiative. All income from the sale of emission permits on this market is transferred to a Green Fund. This fund made it possible to finance the Program for the reduction and avoidance of greenhouse gases by the development of intermodal transportation (PREGTI). Despite the various strategies to promote the program, only 23% of the budget envelope ($33 million) was committed between 2013 and 2017. In addition, the low impact of funded initiatives in terms of GHG reduction has also been heavily criticized in the media. The objective of this article is to better understand the difficulties related to the financing and development of intermodal transport. It is based on 36 interviews conducted with key players in the Quebec maritime sector (ports, maritime industry, regional and local communities, and government). This study allowed us to identify 5 factors that could explain the difficulties related to the development of intermodality in Quebec: complexity in measuring GHG reductions, deficient application of the principle of additionality, uncertainty as to the viability and profitability of projects, difficulty in mobilizing stakeholders around a new paradigm of transportation, and, complexity of reporting mechanisms. This research has important managerial and political implications. In particular, it makes it possible to identify important parameters to be considered when developing GHG emission reduction programs in the field of intermodal transport.
