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Climate change produces new challenges to the development strategies of the most vulnerable countries, where there is urgent need of effective adaptation policies. However, the uncertainty about the expected costs of climate change and about the benefits of adaptation hampers the design and the implementation of adequate measures. Alternative decision-support tools and decision strategies can be adopted by policy makers and the private investors. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of Portfolio Analysis (PA) as a decision-support tool for adaptation strategies under different climate change scenarios. PA effectiveness is explored in the context of tea plantation investments in Rwanda. Tea is a key commodity for the Rwandan economy, and the agriculture sector is one of the most negatively affected by climatic changes, especially in developing countries. It is a perennial crop, for which investments have high sunk costs and economic returns are highly sensitive to changes in the average temperature and in rainfall distributions. Thus, returns on investments in new tea plants are affected by high climate-induced uncertainty. PA aggregates different investment options into portfolios, instead of considering a single option, and allows identification of an efficiency frontier of best portfolios in terms of trade-off between economic efficiency (expected net present value) and risk (variance of the economic performance). In spite of its advantages, PA remains rarely used in climate change adaptation analysis. In this paper we show how PA can be performed in practice when evaluating adaptation investments against different climate change scenarios. The results show that, using PA, new possible allocations of resources emerge, identifying alternative investment solutions with a better trade-off between economic return and risk. PA here emerges as an effective tool in designing long-term investments in the agriculture sector, robust to the complex and uncertain effects of climate change. A Sensitivity analysis of the results to different social discount rates and different climate change scenarios suggests how these two factors can be relevant for the choice of investment portfolios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing globalisation and climate change are challenging the sustainability of our societies. It is now clear that climate change and its devastating impacts cannot be resolved by new technology or governance alone. They require a broader, cultural shift. As a result, the role of human beings' ‘inner dimensions’ and related transformations is attracting increased attention from researchers. Recent advances in neuroscience suggest for instance that mindfulness can open new pathways towards sustainability. However, the role of mindfulness in climate adaptation has been largely ignored. This paper is the first exploratory empirical investigation into linking individuals' intrinsic mindfulness (as opposed to outside mindfulness interventions) to pro- and reactive climate adaptation. Based on a survey of citizens at risk from severe climate events, we explore if, and how individual mindfulness is correlated with climate adaptation at different scales. The results show that individual mindfulness coincides with higher motivation to take climate adaptation actions or to support them, especially actions that are ‘other-focused’ or support pro-environmental behaviour. Mindfulness may also corroborate the acknowledgement of climate change and associated risk perception, and it may steer people away from fatalistic attitudes. We conclude with a call for more research into the relationship between human beings' inner dimensions and climate adaptation in the wider public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under uncertainty about the kind, extent, or time frames of coastal threats, efficient protection requires measures that are effective in time and flexible enough to assure protection even if conditions change over time. Existing protection options are unable to offer both attributes simultaneously, creating a trade-off between short-term and long-term effectiveness in protection choice. This paper investigates the role played by differences in the temporal effectiveness of coastal protection measures in the choice of protection modes. Results from a discrete-choice experiment implemented in Papua New Guinea suggest that respondents have a strong preference for long-term over short-term effectiveness; an urgency to protect cannot be identified. Using incentivized preference measures for patience and risk-aversion as well as sociodemographic controls, we account for taste heterogeneity and validate the robustness of our results. • Adaptation to climate change requires decision making under intertemporal uncertainty. • Our DCE focuses on the role of temporal effectiveness in a developing country context. • Results suggest strong preferences for long-term over short-term effectiveness. • An urgency to protect cannot be identified. • Results are robust to including revealed preference measures for patience and risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]