Climate Change Disaster Management: Mitigation and Adaptation in a Public Goods Framework

This paper explores the collective action problem as it relates to climate change and develops two models that capture the mitigation/adaptation trade-off. The first model presents climate change as a certain disaster, while the second models climate change as a stochastic event. A one-shot public goods experiment with students reveals a relatively low rate of mitigation for both models. The effect of vulnerability towards climate change is also examined by varying the magnitude of the disaster across treatments. Our results find no significant difference between the high and low-vulnerability environments. This research contributes to the literature concerning public goods experiments as well as the analysis of climate change policy.