Revisiting the role of disasters in climate policy-making

A general malaise exists today about the prospects for timely and effective climate action. This calls for increased attention to factors that enable climate policy change. Among these enabling factors are hydrological, climatological, and meteorological disasters, including floods, extreme temperatures, drought, wildfires, and storms. What impacts these disasters have on climate policy-making is contested; some view them as potential focusing events leading to unique opportunities for policy learning and reform, while others anticipate no or limited effects. Recent research, however, has yielded few advances to document and explain these diverging outcomes. This article revisits research on how climate disasters shape climate policy-making to identify knowledge gaps and future research directions. The article highlights past research foci as a basis for pinpointing unresolved puzzles, questions, and phenomena. Future research directions are identified, including the general association between disaster events and climate policy-making, policy design and quality, and the potential for ripple effects from different disaster types and across policy issue areas. These research directions aim to widen the perspective regarding how post-disaster politics may shape climate policy-making and the factors that matter in this process. Redirecting the focus from documenting types and patterns of policy change to identifying policy designs that lead to positive outcomes is a particularly promising avenue for advancing this research and contributing to climate policy-making.Efforts to improve post-disaster policy learning and reform need to recognize that disasters are political events where policy actors often must respond to public criticism while at the same time identifying policy lessons.Whether disasters enable constructive policy-making depends on how events are framed by stakeholders and in public debates, including the allocation of responsibility for failure in risk reduction, planning, preparedness, and response.Policy change prompted by disasters may be elusive because it sometimes results from subtle learning, diffusion effects from distant events, heightened risk awareness, and only materializes over the long term.The political atmosphere of post-disaster episodes increases the risk of maladaptation and misdirected policy reforms. Therefore, policy-making should be targeted at measures that actually reduce vulnerability and enhance disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.