【Speaker】：Dr. Alessandro Taberna (Postdoctoral Researcher at the European Institute on Economics and the Environment)

【Title】：Mind the gap: linking individual adaptation decisions to global climate mitigation policy

【Time】：4:00 pm, Jan 13, 2026.

【Location】：Zoom Meeting ID: 968 7568 8599, Passcode: 867262

【About Report】：Adapting to climate change is a complex decision process sensitive to local contexts and contingent on global mitigation pathways. At the same time, aggregate individual economic choices have important repercussions for global climate strategies. Climate-economy models characterizing global mitigation and impacts pathways lack geographical detail and behavioural heterogeneity to represent micro-level adaptation to climate change. This paper introduces the first bidirectional coupling between a climate-economy integrated assessment (RICE50+) and a regional economic agent-based model (CRAB) incorporating multiple autonomous adaptation strategies against different climate hazards. Our framework captures climate-economy interactions where changing climate conditions adversely affect local flooding and labor productivity, while location-based adaptation investments feed back into aggregate macro-level damage functions. Using detailed spatial climate impacts data under different global mitigation scenarios as well as behavioral survey data from the Netherlands and USA, we demonstrate significant regional variation in adaptation patterns, costs, and efficiency. Cost-benefit analysis reveals consistently positive but mitigation policy-dependent and country-specific returns from private adaptation. Moreover, we find that adaptation complements rather than substitutes mitigation efforts. Sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the results remain robust across a wide range of parameters. This coupled modeling approach provides a robust platform for evaluating climate strategies that bridge local adaptation decisions with global climate dynamics.