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Near-term benefits from investment in climate adaptation complement long-term economic returns from emissions reduction

Lei Duan, Angelo Carlino, and Ken Caldeira · Communications Earth & Environment 6 · 2025

Key finding. Relative to investment in abatement, adaptation has a much shorter timescale for economic return, and deploying adaptation alongside abatement delivers earlier benefits than abatement alone — with greater net benefit in both the near and the long term from the combination.

Three panels. Panel A is a bar chart of the year at which annual and cumulative consumption become positive, under prescribed-emissions and balancing scenarios, with orange bars for abatement only, green for abatement combined with adaptation, and blue for the benefit of adaptation. The abatement-only bars reach about 30 to 50 years while the adaptation bars are below 10. Panels B and C show the change in cumulative consumption at the break-even year and at year 50.
Adaptation pays back within about a decade while abatement alone takes three to five, and combining the two brings the break-even year forward relative to abating alone. Figure 3 from Duan et al. (2025), Communications Earth & Environment 6, 5. Reproduced under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Extracted from the published PDF and used unmodified, as the licence requires.

What question did this research address?

Emissions abatement reduces climate damage decades hence; adaptation reduces climate damage now. Both are investments, but they pay back on very different schedules.

This paper asked how the timescales of economic return compare, and whether deploying the two together produces a better outcome than either alone.

What did we find?

Using a parsimonious economic-climate assessment model, the study compares the time profile of returns from investment in abatement against investment in adaptation.

The two are governed by different parameters. The timescale of return on abatement depends strongly on the economic discount rate; the timescale of return on adaptation depends strongly on the capital depreciation timescale.

The combination outperforms either alone, with abatement reducing long-term climate damage while adaptation reduces near-term damage.

The strategies do interact. Higher levels of abatement investment, of the kind implied by stringent emissions constraints, reduce the returns available from adaptation investment — because successful abatement leaves less damage for adaptation to avert.

Even accounting for that interaction, investing in both yields greater net benefits in both the near and the long term than investing in abatement alone.

Why does it matter?

The finding addresses the political timing problem directly. If abatement's benefits arrive beyond the horizon of the generation paying for them, then a complementary investment that pays back within that horizon changes the incentives facing the people who must decide.

It also resists the framing of adaptation and abatement as rivals for the same budget. They address damage on different timescales, so the relevant question is the mix rather than the choice.

Citation

Lei Duan, Angelo Carlino, and Ken Caldeira (2025). Near-term benefits from investment in climate adaptation complement long-term economic returns from emissions reduction. Communications Earth & Environment 6.

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