{"title":"Private investments in climate change adaptation are increasing in Europe, although sectoral differences remain.","authors":"Ignasi Cortés Arbués, Theodoros Chatzivasileiadis, Servaas Storm, Olga Ivanova, Tatiana Filatova","doi":"10.1038/s43247-025-02454-3","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Climate-induced hazards are becoming more frequent and severe, causing escalating economic losses worldwide. Consequently, climate change adaptation is increasingly necessary to protect people, nature and the economy. However, little is known about who is adapting and how much they spend on adaptation measures, especially in the private sector. This article focuses on firms-the backbone of economic development, yet understudied in climate adaptation research. Here we present insights from a unique panel dataset detailing businesses' adaptation investments across 28 European countries (2018-2022), 5 hazard types, and 19 economic sectors. Our descriptive analysis reveals low but increasing adaptation investments across Europe (0.15-0.92% of national gross domestic product, annually increasing by 30.6-37.4%). Moreover, we highlight considerable differences in adaptation intensity across sectors, including low adaptation intensity in manufacturing and retail trade. Additionally, our econometric analysis indicates that public adaptation spending crowds in private investments in adaptation, highlighting opportunities to facilitate autonomous adaptation.</p>","PeriodicalId":10530,"journal":{"name":"Communications Earth & Environment","volume":"6 1","pages":"470"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12173939/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Communications Earth & Environment","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02454-3","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/6/17 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Climate-induced hazards are becoming more frequent and severe, causing escalating economic losses worldwide. Consequently, climate change adaptation is increasingly necessary to protect people, nature and the economy. However, little is known about who is adapting and how much they spend on adaptation measures, especially in the private sector. This article focuses on firms-the backbone of economic development, yet understudied in climate adaptation research. Here we present insights from a unique panel dataset detailing businesses' adaptation investments across 28 European countries (2018-2022), 5 hazard types, and 19 economic sectors. Our descriptive analysis reveals low but increasing adaptation investments across Europe (0.15-0.92% of national gross domestic product, annually increasing by 30.6-37.4%). Moreover, we highlight considerable differences in adaptation intensity across sectors, including low adaptation intensity in manufacturing and retail trade. Additionally, our econometric analysis indicates that public adaptation spending crowds in private investments in adaptation, highlighting opportunities to facilitate autonomous adaptation.
期刊介绍:
Communications Earth & Environment is an open access journal from Nature Portfolio publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances that bring new insight to a specialized area in Earth science, planetary science or environmental science.
Communications Earth & Environment has a 2-year impact factor of 7.9 (2022 Journal Citation Reports®). Articles published in the journal in 2022 were downloaded 1,412,858 times. Median time from submission to the first editorial decision is 8 days.