Underprepared for the Storm: Climate beliefs, mortgage default, and the underpreparedness channel

An event by the climaTRACES Lab. Anno von Heimburg (PhD Student, University of Cambridge) About this workshop Climate-sceptic households in high physical risk areas show disproportionately large mortgage default responses to climate disasters. This inverts the naive hypothesis that climate believers default more through negative expectation updating. The mechanism is under preparedness: sceptic households are less insured, less adapted, and locate in riskier areas without adequate buffers, meaning climate shocks push them past the default threshold more easily than believers. The weekly climaTRACES workshops, organised by Kamiar Mohaddes and Henning Zschietzschmann, are attended by a diverse group of people from economics, geography, politics, engineering, business, earth sciences, natural