From Coping with Natural Disasters in the Past to a Model of Future Optimal Adaptation

The aim of this paper is to gain insights from studying adaptation to natural disasters in the past in order to analyze optimal adaptation in Switzerland in the future. Most adaptation measures already undertaken in Switzerland are so-called reactive measures. They may be eective, but not necessarily ecient. We propose that future climate change asks for proactive measures to combat market damages in an ecient way. We come up with modeling adaptation as a cumulative stock in a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model called ADAPT-CH. We nd that with an investment of up to 0.9% of the GDP, a little more than 58% of the exogenously given climate damages in Switzerland can be prevented until 2060.