Economic costs of climate change are conventionally assessed at the aggregated global and national levels, while adaptation is local. When present, regionalised assessments are confined to direct damages, hindered by both data and models’ limitations. This article goes beyond the aggregated analysis to explore direct and indirect economic consequences of sea level rise (SLR) at regional and sectoral levels in Europe. Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model and novel datasets, we estimate the distribution of losses and gains across regions and sectors. A comparison of a high-end scenario against a no-climate-impact baseline suggests a GDP loss of 1.26% (€871.8 billion) for the whole EU&UK. Conversely our refined assessments show that some coastal regions lose 9.56–20.84% of GDP, revealing striking regional disparities. Inland regions grow due to the displaced demand from coastal areas, but the GDP gains are small (0–1.13%). While recovery benefits the construction sector, public services and industry face significant downturns. We show that prioritising recovery of critical sectors locally reduces massive regional GDP losses, at negligible costs to the overall European economy. Our analysis traces regional economic restructuring triggered by SLR, underscoring the necessity of region-specific adaptation policies that embrace uneven geographic impacts and unique sectoral profiles to inform resilient strategy design.

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The present study attempts to evaluate an allegedly promising instrument of environmental policy: public information campaigns for raising awareness, as reflected by enhanced environmental preferences. We evaluate an intensive campaign addressing plastic pollution in a coastal and marine environment, an issue of high environmental importance which is increasingly attracting public interest. Using stated preference surveys, we evaluate the effects of the campaign on preferences for ecosystem services and environmental goods. Our focus lies in the temporal effects across seasons, inducing different ecosystem services, approximating the effects of information on use and non-use values. Our findings indicate that systematic provision of information can enhance preferences and, although a time-decay effect exists, awareness remains significantly enhanced after the end of the campaign albeit not uniformly across different (use and non-use) values. As the impacts on preferences are subject to variation of seasonal experience with ecosystems - implying variation in the intensity of use – additional to a time-decay effect, it emerges that although information is a necessary instrument of environmental policy, it cannot be a sufficient one. An effective policy, addressing the needs of future generations, also requires instruments that give economic signals (taxes) and constrain preferences (standards) with information provision enhancing their impacts.@en