Defocusing disasters? Climate shocks and the attention–policy translation failure

Do climate disasters accelerate mitigation policy, or can they slow it down? We develop a political-economy model in which disasters simultaneously (i) raise the perceived returns to mitigation by increasing the salience of climate risk, amplified by diagnostic expectations, and (ii) tighten fiscal constraints by destroying output and triggering reconstruction. Contrary to the focusing events literature, we show that more extreme disasters are, under identifiable conditions, less likely to produce mitigation policy rather than more. The model delivers an attention-policy translation failure: sufficiently severe disasters can increase perceived climate risk and demand for climate action while reducing mitigation policy output in the near to medium run. In a dynamic extension, the mitigation shortfall can persist for a decade through capital dynamics even as beliefs revert. We empirically illustrate the mechanism using the 1990 Western European windstorm cluster as a natural experiment, where highly exposed countries show rising public concern alongside a relative slowdown in mitigation legislation over the subsequent decade, consistent with the model’s defocusing channel.