Journal article
The impact of COVID-19 fiscal spending on climate change adaptation and resilience
- Abstract:
- Government expenditure and taxation have a significant influence on the long-term adaptation and resilience of societies to climate and other environmental shocks. Unprecedented fiscal spending in the COVID-19 recovery offered an opportunity to systematically enhance adaptation and resilience to future shocks. But did the ‘build back better’ rhetoric manifest in more resilient policy? We develop a dedicated fiscal policy taxonomy for climate change adaptation and resilience (A&R)—the Climate Resilience and Adaptation Financing Taxonomy (CRAFT)—and apply this to analyse ~8,000 government policies across 88 countries. We find that US$279–334 billion (9.7–11.1%) of economic recovery spending potentially had direct A&R benefits. This positive spending is substantial in absolute terms but falls well below adaptation needs. Moreover, a notable portion (27.6–28%) of recovery spending may have had negative impacts on A&R, acting to lock in non-resilient infrastructure. We add a deep learning algorithm to consider A&R themes in associated COVID-19 policy documents. Compared with climate mitigation, A&R received only one-third of the spending and was mentioned only one-seventh as frequently in policy documents. These results suggest that the COVID-19 fiscal response missed many opportunities to advance climate A&R. We draw conclusions for how to better align fiscal policy with A&R.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 4.1MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41893-024-01269-y
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Sustainability More from this journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 270–281
- Publication date:
- 2024-02-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-01-03
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2398-9629
- ISSN:
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2398-9629
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1615003
- Local pid:
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pubs:1615003
- Deposit date:
-
2024-02-08
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Sadler et al
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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