Climate Resilient Development and Disasters : Trend analysis of policy change after milestone events in the period 2000 - 2020

Sammanfattning: There is a debate within the field of policy studies whether disasters are drivers of policy reforms, as encapsulated by the disaster-reform hypothesis. Since the disaster rate for extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change, it is of high relevance to study if these disasters have any effect on climate polices. The aim of this thesis is therefore to empirically explore if there are any discernible global trends of disasters preceding a subsequent increase in Climate resilient development (CRD) policies and to show the variation of “effect lag” between income groups and regions. The research design operationalises the most severe disasters through “milestone events” and creates a CRD index by the arithmetical mean of sustainable development, climate adaptation, and climate mitigation. The results show a proportional share of countries experienced an effect lag of 1-3 years after their milestone events, while a large incidence of HIC and LMIC countries had a lag of 4-6 years. This explorative thesis has provided a research design and results on CRD, previously undescribed, that suggests several pathways for future studies such as interesting samples for case studies and alternative designs to the operationalisation of concepts.