Adaptation Effectiveness and Free-Riding Incentives in International Environmental Agreements

Abstract

While an international agreement over the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions proves to be elusive, there is a large and growing support for investment in developing more effective technologies to adapt to climate change. We show that an increase in effectiveness of adaptation will diminish the incentive of individual countries to free-ride on a global agreement over emissions. Moreover, we show that this positive effect of an increase in adaptation's effectiveness can also be accompanied by an increase in the gains from global cooperation over GHGs emissions.