Adaptation and climate-resilient development 1980-2008

DOI

The main empirical paper (Fankhauser and McDermott 2014) uses panel data on natural disasters at the country-year level to estimate the degree of adaptation to disaster risks observed in countries with different income levels. This information is then used to explain the origin and nature of the so-called adaptation gap: the observation that low-income countries tend to have lower levels of adaptation than high-income countries.This CCCEP project explored, from an economics angle, policy challenges related to climate-resilient development and adaptation to climate change. There were three main lines of enquiry. A first set of papers analysed the link between economic development, income growth and vulnerability to climate change. They explored to what extent economic development might increase or decrease the climate change risks faced by developing countries. A second set of papers analysed what the extra costs might be of climate-proofing economic development paths, in other words, what the costs of adaptation could be. The third strand of work was normative and developed recommendations for adaptation planning and the allocation of adaptation finance.

The paper relied on the natural disaster data from the Munich Re NatCat database. The proprietary NatCat database records all natural hazard events worldwide that result in property damage or personal injury. The paper used data for two disaster types over the period 1980 to 2008, floods and tropical cyclones. The disaster data were converted into 2,274 country-year observationsthat formed the dependent variable. The control variables include economic data (GDP, GDP per capita, and government spending) from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and estimates of country size (area in km2) from the Portland State University Country Geography data set. For more information, see the ReadMe file attached.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-853653
Metadata Access https://datacatalogue.cessda.eu/oai-pmh/v0/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_ddi25&identifier=cd16e746833e0966ccb3b91c4e921a493634220a4b79320bffe5e43963883c97
Provenance
Creator Fankhauser, S, London School of Economics
Publisher UK Data Service
Publication Year 2019
Funding Reference Economic and Social Research Council
Rights Sam Fankhauser, London School of Economics. Thomas KJ McDermott, University of Galway; The Data Collection is available from an external repository. Access is available via Related Resources.
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Numeric
Discipline Economics; Social and Behavioural Sciences
Spatial Coverage World Wide