Topic: Toward climate-resilient homes: understanding barriers to financing protective measures for climate-related disasters
Speaker: Nurit Nobel
Date: January 14, 2026
Time: 13.00-14.00
Location: Teams (link will be published here)
Organizers: Sustainable Finance Lab
ABSTRACT: Household climate adaptation is essential and typically requires upfront investment, yet uptake of adaptation loans remains low. We investigate why, focusing on how the renovation’s purpose—climate adaptation versus routine maintenance—affects willingness to finance. Across four preregistered experiments (N = 2,607) with U.S. homeowners participants were less willing to fund upgrades purported to protect their home from a looming climate disaster than from a comparable maintenance problem. The effect generalized across flood and fire domains and persisted under both moderate and high reported risk. Mediation analyses showed that the climate adaptation penalty was explained by lower perceived risk and lower perceived efficacy of climate-purpose upgrades. Even when explicit efficacy information was provided, the climate penalty persisted, indicating that efficacy beliefs are sticky and not easily changed. These results identify important barriers to climate adaptation finance and highlight risk and efficacy beliefs as levers for policy and practice.
BIO: Nurit Nobel is a Research Fellow at Stockholm School of Economics Center for Retailing and Center for Sustainability Research. She is also affiliated researcher at Sustainable Finance Lab Sweden and with Harvard University’s Sustainability Transparency Accountability Research (STAR) Lab, where she did her post-doc during 2023-2025. Nurit has a PhD in Marketing from Stockholm School of Economics, and a Msc. in Social Psychology from London School of Economics. Her research explores ways to nudge consumers toward decisions that promote sustainability in its broad sense, encompassing both financial and environmental aspects. She conducts empirical research in both field and lab.
