The number of second homes (SHs) and coastal short-term rentals (CSTRs) is increasing worldwide. Although SHs and CSTRs contribute to economic and tourism development, these properties remain at potential risks due to the impacts of climate change. This has become an issue of concern for many Canadian municipalities as they are responsible for ensuring the safety and security of buildings and their residents during emergencies (e.g., storm and flood). Without data and information about SHs and CSTRs, it is difficult for municipalities and emergency services to provide rescue operations. This study articulates the issues of SHs by surveying Canadian municipal planners. This study also assesses the physical vulnerability of CSTRs in the context of climate change by using Geographic Information System. Municipalities need to manage and regulate the activities of SHs and CSTRs to ensure safety and security of buildings and their occupants through planning and decision making.

This book is the first to address the important interrelationship between second homes and climate change, which has become an increasingly relevant issue for many regions around the world. Second homes are often a key source of tourist visitation as well as economic benefit for their host communities. The chapters provide an array of international case studies and climate change impacts, including the changing biocultural landscapes in Italy, hazard risks in the mountains of Poland, and the shifting media discussion on second homes and climate change in Finland. Topics covered focus on issues around planning and governance in second home locations, adaptation and mitigation measures implemented by second home owners, and the influence of second home owners’ place attachment in relation to second home impacts. It introduces the overall topic of second homes and climate change while also laying the groundwork for future work in this burgeoning area of research. This book will be of significant interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and academics in the fields of geography, tourism, planning, housing studies, regional development, environmental management, and disaster management. It would also be of use for professionals who engage with second home communities, particularly planners, government officials, and environmental officers.

This book is the first to address the important interrelationship between second homes and climate change, which has become an increasingly relevant issue for many regions around the world. Second homes are often a key source of tourist visitation as well as economic benefit for their host communities. The chapters provide an array of international case studies and climate change impacts, including the changing biocultural landscapes in Italy, hazard risks in the mountains of Poland, and the shifting media discussion on second homes and climate change in Finland. Topics covered focus on issues around planning and governance in second home locations, adaptation and mitigation measures implemented by second home owners, and the influence of second home owners’ place attachment in relation to second home impacts. It introduces the overall topic of second homes and climate change while also laying the groundwork for future work in this burgeoning area of research. This book will be of significant interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and academics in the fields of geography, tourism, planning, housing studies, regional development, environmental management, and disaster management. It would also be of use for professionals who engage with second home communities, particularly planners, government officials, and environmental officers.

Coastal communities face increasing threat from climate change as sea level rise increases chronic shoreline erosion and more frequent storms lead to sporadic but huge damages. A natural conflict between eroding beaches and growing coastal development has led to active coastal management policy to stabilize shoreline and protect coastal property and infrastructure, including seawalls, jetties, and beach nourishment. Beach nourishment – the process of periodically rebuilding an eroding section of a beach with sand dredged from offshore sand reserves or inlets, is the dominant climate adaptation policy along the US Atlantic coastline. Whereas existing literature focuses on the valuation of beach amenities, the economic impact of adaptation policies is not well understood. This dissertation focuses on beach nourishment as a climate adaptation tool and examines (1) the impact capitalized in the coastal real estate market, (2) factors that determine the frequency of nourishment and (3) whether there is sorting across housing groups based on the expectation of beach stability. In the second chapter, we use a quasi-experimental approach to examine the capitalized effect of nourishment in northern Outer Banks, North Carolina and attempt to isolate storm protection effects from the amenity value of beach nourishment using the occurrence of Hurricane Sandy as a natural experiment. Results show that the benefits from widened beaches are capitalized by oceanfront and nearshore homes targeted by the nourishment project. We also find positive spillover effects in amenity values but the benefits of storm risk reduction are highly localized. Heterogeneity in the distribution of benefits across different locations motivates the need for spatially targeted polices to sustain shoreline stabilization. In the third chapter, we use a duration model to empirically test the influence of both supply and demand factors on the incidence of beach nourishment using data from coastal towns in North Carolina and New Jersey. We find that close access to sand reserves results in more frequent nourishment. Results also show that towns with high property values, high erosion rates, large shoreline lengths, and low elevation are likely to accelerate beach nourishment. These results complement findings in numerical models linking coastline change with economic decisions of beach nourishment (Smith, et al., 2009). As climate change induces sea-level rise and changing storm patterns, the demand for beach nourishment is increasing while the supply of nourishment quality sand is becoming scarce. Our findings motivate the need for beach towns to coordinate both the dredging of sand sources and where the sand is placed for effective coastal adaptation and efficient allocation of common pool sand resources. In the fourth chapter, we begin to examine sorting behavior across housing groups along the coast using a structural model. Households with different preferences and information (reflecting knowledge of coastal dynamics and expectations of management interventions) likely select distinct locations that offer the best price-quality tradeoff conditional on their information. Location decisions may depend on the expectation of beach stability rather than the current beach quality alone. We use a discrete choice model to examine the willingness to pay for beach nourishment across space using data of three coastal counties in North Carolina.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

"The world has been urbanizing at an incredible pace during the last century. Meanwhile, the global rise in temperatures has led to the increased probabilities of gradual and sudden natural disasters, putting large shares of developed lands at risk. While the benefits from agglomeration economies are well documented, less is known on how local stakeholders make land-use decisions in the context of climate change. Understanding how economic agents in charge of land conversion cope with climate threats while trying to preserve urban opportunities is a paramount challenge for the next decades. This dissertation aims to shed some light on a few of the mechanisms at play, looking at spaces threatened by diverse environmental catastrophes.In this regard, the second chapter of this thesis, 'The Political Economy of Coastal Destruction,' studies the impact of political cooperation on coastal development choices, made in Spain between 1979 and 2015. We argue that political cooperation between municipal neighbors is fostered by local political alignment. We rely on a fuzzy regression discontinuity design in close elections to assess the impact of political homophily on coastal development. We show that coastal municipalities who decide on coastal development in isolation may overdevelop as they fail to internalize the positive amenity spillovers caused by land preservation. Within the first-kilometer fringe, local governments sharing their neighbors' ideology develop 63% less than otherwise similar but politically isolated governments. This effect vanishes as we consider farther distances from the coastline, suggesting that amenity spillovers are an essential driver of this result.While overdevelopment induces higher exposure to hazards when locating in disaster-prone areas, appropriate preparation can mitigate the chances of suffering from a natural catastrophe. However, mitigation measures do not only reduce but also signal the inherent risks of a location. I focus on the trade-off between risk reduction and risk disclosure in the third chapter of my thesis, 'Does media coverage affect government preparation for natural disasters?'. I demonstrate that in the absence of information circulating about local dangers, local governments, who seek to protect property values in their jurisdiction, have an incentive not to prepare to avoid signaling the latent risks to otherwise uninformed investors. To test this hypothesis, I construct an exogenous measure of newspaper coverage of storms, which is a good predictor of the number of newspaper articles published about these events. I show that conditional on being hit by a storm, a one-standard-deviation increase in my Coverage measure leads to a 54% increase in the number of mitigation projects implemented in a ZIP code. This result is primarily driven by neighborhoods with high pre-treatment levels of vacant houses, renters, and housing-units owned with a mortgage, suggesting that non-resident investors are the firsts to respond to the information shock.Considering that real estate interests could capture governments' preparation incentives, I questioned whether individuals learn from past disasters when making a development decision. In the last paper of this thesis, 'The Dynamics of Land Development around Flood Zones,' we study the land conversion response to an inundation. Exploiting a rich dataset on historical flood records in Spain, we show that new development drops at the municipal level by -14.64% in the year following an inundation, and peaks down at -26% in the sixth year. The decrease in land conversion is, on average, permanent. This outcome is primarily driven by municipalities with higher historical flood frequencies, and by floods occurring after the central government regulated constructions around flood zones, in 1986. New development neither occurs farther away from flood zones nor on the higher ground. These results could be consistent with several underlying mechanisms. In particular, if individuals do account for disaster history when making a development decision, it is puzzling to observe they prefer not to build rather than building away from the acknowledged source of dangers. We speculate that a misinterpretation of the risks caused by an availability bias, or an aversion to amenity losses, could explain this response." -- TDX.