Private disaster expenditures by rural Bangladeshi households: evidence from survey data

This paper investigates household’s private expenditures to cope with the harmful losses of climate change and disasters. Using household-level survey data from Bangladesh, this paper finds that disaster-affected rural Bangladeshi households allocate between $499 and$1076 in disaster-related expenditures. Such expenditures are always greater than their relevant precautionary savings, implying that those households may debt-finance their defensive measures. Households with greater precautionary savings spend more: a 100% increase in precautionary savings can increase disaster expenditures by 5%. Moreover, there are considerable regional heterogeneities in household’s disaster expenditures. Increased public sector allocations in addition to carefully designed affordable market-based financing instruments can potentially ease the pressure on disaster-affected households in their fight against the harms of climate change and disaster

The impact of climate legislation on trade-related carbon emissions 1996–2018

We analyse the international impact on carbon emissions from national climate legislation in 111 countries over 1996–2018. We estimate trade-related carbon leakage, or net carbon imports, as the difference between consumption and production emissions. Legislation has had a significant negative and roughly similar impact on both consumption and production emissions. The net impact on trade-related emissions is therefore not statistically significant, neither in the short term (laws passed in the last 3 years) nor the long term (laws older than 3 years). We find a significant negative long-term impact on domestic emissions from laws passed by trade partners. This latter specification corresponds to the traditional definition of carbon leakage. Overall, we conclude that there has been no detrimental effect of climate legislation on international emissions

The impact of climate legislation on trade-related carbon emissions 1997-2017

We present empirical evidence of the international emissions impact from climate change legislation in 98 countries between 1997 and 2017, using data from Climate Change Laws of the World. Unlike traditional measures of carbon leakage, we focus on net carbon imports, that is, the difference between consumption and production emissions. Using different estimation techniques, we estimate the impact on carbon intensity of two legislation variables, recent legislation (passed in the last 3 years) and older legislation (passed more than 3 years ago). We find that recent legislation reduces production emissions more than consumption emissions, while older laws have a bigger impact on consumption emissions. The combined effect of these changes on net carbon imports is very small. Overall, we find no evidence that domestic climate legislation has increased international carbon leakage over the past two decades. Indeed, in high-income countries the longrun leakage rate may even be negative

Do natural disasters change savings and employment choices? Evidence from Bangladesh and Pakistan

The paper investigates the economic response of households to natural disasters in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and in particular, to what extent households adjust their income, employment strategies and savings in response to floods and storms. It discusses policy implications in terms of developing non-farm employment opportunities to reduce future harm, and financing economic migration to reduce income vulnerability. In Bangladesh, farmers move away from farm to nonfarm employment as a coping strategy, whereas nonfarmers increase their off-farm labor supply. Although farmers in Pakistan move away from agriculture as an immediate response to disasters, within a year they return to farming.UK's Department of International Development (DFID

How do African SMEs respond to climate risks? Evidence from Kenya and Senegal

This paper investigates to what extent and how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in poor countries are adapting to climate risks using data from 325 SMEs in the semi-arid regions of Kenya and Senegal. There is a clear role for public policy in facilitating good adaptation. The ability of firms to respond to climate risks depends on factors that can be shaped through policy intervention. Findings show that financial barriers are a key reason why firms resort to reactive coping mechanisms, while general business support, access to information technology and adaptation assistance encourages sustainable adaptation responses.UK Government’s Department for International Development (DfID)Financial support from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) through the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Polic

Tenure security, human capital and soil conservation in an overlapping generation rural economy

We develop an overlapping generation model of rural agricultural households to examine whether tenure security and subsistence needs influence the choice between unexploited topsoil and investment in children's human capital as the mode of transfer of wealth. A unique dataset from Bangladesh finds that tenure security is associated with greater topsoil conservation and lower human capital investment. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between these two modes of transfer. We suggest that increased public expenditure on schooling, which substitutes private expenditure, may lower the pressure on land and soil resources

Energy efficiency and CO2 emissions : evidence from the UK universities

Understanding how energy efficiency improvement can mitigate CO2 emissions is critical for global climate change policies to ensure environmental sustainability and a low carbon future. Being the catalyst for training future generations, universities can play a leading role in this vision by adopting energy-saving and emissions reduction strategies. Using HESA data, a centralized system of reporting energy use and corresponding emissions, we adopt a two-step system GMM estimation procedure to estimate the effect of energy efficiency on CO2 emissions for 119 UK universities over the period between 2008-09 and 2018-19. Results confirm that higher energy efficiency is conducive to lower emissions. However, the less-than-elastic relationship between energy efficiency and emissions implies that energy efficiency improvement alone cannot enable the UK universities to comply with their net-zero objectives unless they increasingly adopt renewable energy sources. Despite this, universities were able to avoid 2.21 gtCO2e emissions over the sample period due to energy efficiency improvements. Our results are robust to alternative specifications

Tenure security and soil conservation in an overlapping generation rural economy

Tenure security and subsistence needs influence the choice between unexploited topsoil and unspent money (i.e., savings) as the mode of transfer. Using a unique household-level dataset from Bangladesh, which contains data on cropping-intensity and savings spent on education, we detect that rural agricultural households with secured tenure have lower cropping-intensity and higher educational expenditure. Furthermore, tenure security and poverty have opposite, but not offsetting, effects. Households prefer higher educational expenditure to lower cropping-intensity as the mode of transfer. Thus, increased public expenditure may lower the pressure on land and soil resources, by lowering private educational expenditure

Long-term impacts of the 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh

We use childhood exposures to disasters as natural experiments inducing variations in adulthood outcomes. Following the fetal origin hypothesis, we hypothesize that children from households with greater exposure will have poorer health, schooling, and consumption outcomes. Employing a unique dataset from Bangladesh, we test this hypothesis for the 1970 cyclone that killed over 300,000 people in southern Bangladesh. We find that children surviving the cyclone experience significant health, schooling and consumption adversities, and during their adulthood, have lower probabilities of good health and primary schooling; and lower durations of good health, schooling and consumption. Such adversities are further heightened among the rural and less-educated households. Therefore, public programs benefiting the females and the poor, alongside the development of healthcare and schooling infrastructure, can be useful protective measures against the long-term harms of a disaster