Water suppliers are showing greater interest in using residential water audits to promote conservation. Yet there is limited causal evidence on their effectiveness, persistence, and welfare implications. We address this gap using a natural field experiment in the United Kingdom that randomly assigns 45,000 households to receive different behavioral encouragements to complete an online home water audit. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, financial incentives substantially increase audit take-up and lead to large short-run reductions in water use: among compliers, consumption falls by about 17 percent over a two-month period. The size of the incentive matters for participation but not for the magnitude of conservation. Second, conservation effects attenuate rapidly, becoming undetectable after roughly two months. As a result, the intervention yields small welfare gains, with per capita net benefits typically below £1 under a wide range of assumptions. Third, targeting high-use households roughly doubles short-run conservation effects but remains insufficient to generate sizable welfare gains because conservation does not persist. Overall, while audits and incentives induce meaningful short-run conservation, their policy value depends critically on whether these effects persist.

We study how flood impacts, resilience, and adaptation differ across cities worldwide. Combining 3,931 major floods (2000–2023) with data on 9,468 cities in 175 countries, we show: (i) floods reduce urban economic activity by 4.5 percent on average, with losses 3.5 times larger in low-income coun- tries; (ii) cities are becoming more resilient, as sensitivity of economic activity and mortality to floods declines over time, driven by experience-based learning; and (iii) adaptation mechanisms vary by in- come — dams mitigate losses globally, while migration and critical infrastructure enhance resilience only in high-income cities. The disproportionate flood impacts and limited adaptation effectiveness in developing nations highlight an adaptation gap.

What role do government policies which distort market competition play in impeding farmers’ climate change adaptation? We study this question in the context of India, where longer-run adaptation to climate change has been inadequate — posing a considerable risk to its ∼250 million agricultural workers. We exploit spatial discontinuities in intermediary market power, created by state-level laws that restrict farmer-intermediary transactions to the same state, to determine how spatial competition affects farmers’ adaptation. We find that a farmer selling in the 75th percentile of the competition index compared to one that faces the 25th percentile of the competition index achieves a 4.9 percent higher output for each additional day of extreme heat. This effect is driven by increased input usage by farmers in anticipation of higher prices after climate shocks, an effect limited only to to high competition areas. We then propose and estimate a quantitative spatial trade model with intermediary market power to examine the welfare implications of higher competition for adaptation. Our structural estimates suggest that the farmer’s economic loss (i.e. their climate damage function) due to extreme weather could be mitigated by 13.8 percent if government regulation distorting market competition are dismantled. These results highlight the importance of understanding the political economy of reforming these competition-distorting laws to accelerate climate change adaptation.