Adaptation and mitigation as complementary tools for reducing the risk of climate impacts |
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Authors: | Gary Yohe Kenneth Strzepek |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Economics, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA;(2) Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA |
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Abstract: | This paper uses the likelihood of flooding along Brahmaputra and Ganges Rivers in India to explore the hypothesis that adaptation
and mitigation can be viewed as complements rather than sustitutes. For futures where climate change will produce smooth,
monotonic and manageable effects, adopting a mitigation strategy is shown to increase the ability of adaptation to reduce
the likelihood of crossing critical threshold of tolerable climate. For futures where climate change will produce variable
impacts overtime, though, it is possible that mitigation will make adaptation less productive for some time intervals. In
cases of exaggerated climate change, adaptation may fail entirely regardless of how much mitigation is applied. Judging the
degree of complementarity is therefore an empirical question because the relative efficacy of adaptation is site specific
and path dependent. It follows that delibrations over climate policy should rely more on detailed analyses of how the distributions
of possible impacts of climate might change over space and time.
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Keywords: | Adaptation Climate change impacts Climate change risks Flood control Intolerable changes Mitigation Risk management |
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