Climate Impacts on Capital Accumulation in the Small Island State of Barbados

Eric Kemp-Benedict, Jonathan Lamontagne, Tim Laing, Crystal Drakes

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    This paper constructs a model of climate-related damage for small island developing states (SIDS). We focus on the loss of private productive capital stocks through extreme climate events. In contrast to most economic analyses of climate impacts, which assume temperature-dependent damage functions, we draw on the engineering literature to allow for a greater or lesser degree of anticipation of climate change when designing capital stocks and balancing current adaptation expenditure against future loss and damage. We apply the model to tropical storm damage in the small island developing state of Barbados and show how anticipatory behavior changes the damage to infrastructure for the same degree of climate change. Thus, in the model, damage depends on behavior as well as climate variables.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number3192
    Pages (from-to)1-23
    Number of pages23
    JournalSustainability
    Volume11
    Issue number11
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 7 Jun 2019

    Bibliographical note

    © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

    Keywords

    • climate change
    • adaptation
    • loss and damage
    • damage function
    • return period
    • tropical cyclone

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