Abstract
Unexpected climate disasters have been shown to impact public concern for tackling climate change, but not the implementation of mitigation laws. This paper provides an answer to this puzzle by analysing the causal impact of unexpected disaster shocks on mitigation and adaptation laws for 17 Western European countries from 1980 to 2020. Using a staggered difference in difference approach, we show that countries which experience an unexpected extreme climate disaster shock implement less mitigation laws but more adaptation laws relative to the control group. This suggests that while disasters may increase public concern for the environment, the actual legislative impact of a disaster is a shift towards adaptation at the expense of mitigation. We argue that adaptation is prioritised because it can be enacted with more certainty by individual countries. This comes at the expense of mitigation due to resource constraints, which may be particularly heightened following an unexpected disaster.