Abstract

Successful adaptation to changing climate increasingly relies on aligning public and private actions. Individual climate adaptation decisions – such as households’ choices leading to flood risk reduction and increasing resilience – are driven by both economic rationale and behavioral factors. Householdsdecide to adapt locally or to relocate also depending on employment opportunities provided by firms, which increasingly suffer losses from climate related hazards. In this talk I discuss what computational agent-based models (ABMs) can do to assess risks and resilience, focusing on the costliest of hazards – flooding. I present a spatial ABM of a housing market incorporating survey data on choices that households make when facing flood risks. Our results show that as people learn from increasing frequency of flooding, their behavioral changes amplified by social interactions and markets can lead to climate gentrification. Next, I present our ongoing work on collecting longitudinal data on households’ adaptation and self-assessed resilience to floods via surveys in four countries. We complement it with ABMs where households and firms interact in a regional economy to explore dynamic feedbacks of their relocation decisions and path-dependency of developments in flood-prone regions.

Please email gri.events@lse.ac.uk with the name of the presenter in order to request the Zoom joining details for this workshop.

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