Dr. Anita Schiller (p)

Industrial pollution has declined in many high-income countries, yet it remains unclear whether these gains have reduced local environmental inequalities. We analyse the distribution of industrial pollution across neighbourhoods in England and Wales using facility-level data from the United Kingdom Pollutant Release and Transfer Register between 2009 and 2019. Reported emissions of regulated pollutants released to air, land, and water are combined into a common human-toxicity metric and linked to neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics. Despite substantial national emission reductions, the spatial distribution of pollution exposure remains highly persistent: neighbourhoods that were most exposed at the start of the period remain among the most exposed a decade later. Industrial pollution shows a non-linear relationship with income, with chemical toxicity peaking in middle-income neighbourhoods and particulate matter most concentrated in lower-income areas. Higher educational attainment is consistently associated with lower levels of pollution.

Mr Johannes Lohwasser (p), Mr Axel Schaffer, Mr Sangwon Choi

Land take constitutes a major driver of soil degradation and climate-related risks. While land-use decisions are mainly shaped at the municipal level, empirical evidence on the local and spatially interdependent drivers of land take remains limited. This study examines the anthropogenic determinants of land take using a spatially extended STIRPAT framework applied to panel data from 1,600 municipalities in Bavaria, Germany, covering the period from 2014–2022. A Spatial Durbin Error Model is employed to account for spatial dependence and spillover effects across neighboring municipalities. Moreover, literature defines affluence typically as income or GDP per capita indicating the level of affluence of private households or regions. In contrast to, the results of this paper demonstrate that (also) public affluence is a suitable indicator for explaining land take. The results show that population and public affluence exert positive local effects on land take, while urban density significantly restrains land take. Moreover, a non-linear Environmental Kuznets Curve relationship for public affluence is observed, which materializes also through spatial spillover effects. Building permissions emerge as a key policy-related driver, generating positive indirect effects that propagate land consumption across adjacent municipalities. These findings highlight that land take is not only shaped by local conditions but evolves as a spatially interconnected process driven by fiscal capacity and planning decisions. The study underscores the need for coordinated, multi-regional land-use policies and highlights the analytical value of small-scale spatial STIRPAT applications in capturing environmentally relevant development dynamics.

Mr Sangmin Lee (p), Mr Wooyoung Choi, Ms Yewon Choi, Mr Donghwi Kim, Mr Donghwan An, Mr Kwansoo Kim

Normally benefit–cost analysis of climate adaptation counts only the reduction in expected damages, leaving the value of reduced uncertainty uncounted. We extend the appraisal of urban heatwave adaptation to include this additional channel reflecting the fat-tail phenomenon of climate change. Defining utility over damages, we derive the risk premium from the first two conditional moments and obtain the marginal risk premium benefit (MRPB) by differentiating it with respect to the technology stock, since an additional unit shifts both the mean and the variance of damages. Using a panel of all 229 Korean municipalities for 2016–2022, we estimate conditional mean and variance equations for four technologies—cooling fog, cool roofs, green roofs and walls, and shade canopies—and recover benefit–cost ratios to 2050 under four SSP scenarios. All four reduce the conditional variance of damages, and the MRPB amounts to 18.7 to 61.8 percent of the conventional marginal benefit, which only focuses on the mean effects. Incorporating the MRPB as an additional benefit, the number of technologies passing the benefit–cost test is found to be from one to two over the observation period, with cool roofs moving from 0.976 to 1.158, and to three in the projection horizon. The adjustment leaves the ranking of technologies within a region unchanged but widens the gap across emissions pathways, which is 1.3 to 1.4 times on expected benefits alone and 2.3 to 2.6 times once risk associated with climate change is priced. We demonstrate that appraisals that omit the cost of risk therefore understate the value of adaptation, particularly where mitigation is delayed.