The increasing frequency of extreme heatwave events under the severe climate crisis has risen to the surface with the impact of systematic, asymmetric tail risks. Regarding these cases, the study evaluates the economic effects of mitigating heatwave r...
The increasing frequency of extreme heatwave events under the severe climate crisis has risen to the surface with the impact of systematic, asymmetric tail risks. Regarding these cases, the study evaluates the economic effects of mitigating heatwave risks followed by the level of climate resilience, using data on losses that had been caused by heatwaves from 229 municipalities in South Korea between 2016 and 2022. Heatwave damage represents the socio-economic losses that have been quantified to medical expenses and labor productivity losses in due periods. The study examines the structural risk of heatwaves on behalf of asymmetric and fat-tail distribution and derives the risk premium for each metropolitan area using the predicted heatwave damages on each level of resilience.
Risk analysis in the academic field is used to define the risk in the reference point of mean. However, in the case of asymmetric and fat-tailed distribution, mean-based approach can underestimate heatwave risk, as the mean highly depends on the outliers and leads to systematic misunderstanding of actual risk. To understand the asymmetry of fat-tailed characteristics of heatwave damages, this study quantifies variance, skewness and tail-thickness to define the damages and adopts both the mean and median of the distribution, using partial moment approach to estimate the separate effects of resilience on upper and lower tail heatwave risk.
HWRI, the heatwave resilience index, is considered as a main explanatory variable, including the squared term set to check non-linear effect along with meteorological and population controls. High-dimensional fixed effects regression is adopted for 1-4 degrees of upper and lower partial moments absorbing individual and year effects. By assuming the CARA (Constant Absolute Risk Aversion) utility function, the study progressed using the risk premium formulation based on the Taylor expansion so that the residual risk could be turned into monetary value.
Empirical results supported that HWRI has a tendency of decreasing heatwave risk, not only at mean-level, but also at higher degrees of risk such as variance, skewness and tail-thickness. It is likely that the higher resilience the region has, the more the mitigation of risk is present. Moreover, the latent amount of risk coming from difference of risk recognition at separate reference points tended to decrease when the levels of HWRI were higher.
The risk premiums of 17 metropolitan areas reveal that comparatively urban areas where high levels of damage have existed still have substantial amounts of risk costs due to high degrees of risk. On the other hand, comparatively rural areas have lower risk premiums since the risk distributed in each level is lower than the reference point. HWRI also shortens the difference between mean and median-based reference points, thereby reducing the latent risk costs that come from instability in risk evaluation due to asymmetric distributions. Regional heterogeneity across the 17 provinces further reveals that metropolitan areas with substantially high losses (e.g., Seoul and Gyeonggi) continue to face high residual levels of risk, whereas less urbanized regions with smaller losses do not.
By both integrating a resilience index with a reference point-based partial moment framework and transforming its effects into monetary risk costs, this study offers a novel empirical approach to valuing heatwave resilience. These findings emphasize the need for differential heatwave damage references for each region considering regional risk structures and provide standards to develop policies against heatwave risk under constrained public budgets.