Abstract Human behaviour is commonly optimised in economic models of adaptation to climate change. These models assume that people work to maximise profit, subject to financial and technological limitations. In effect, these models simulate adaptive potential. In reality, adaptation falls short of this potential. This shortfall is conceptualised as the adaptation deficit, and it has been causing increasing concern. This study demonstrates the impacts of the ways by which people's real-world adaptive behaviours depart from those assumed under pure optimisation. These departures, known as adaptation constraints, are formalised as numerical preference functions based on an empirical case study in New Zealand, and they are used to constrain an agent-based model of climate change adaptation. We show that these empirically-specified adaptation constraints reduce profits relative to an optimised specification by roughly one third. This demonstrates that unconstrained economic models are likely to significantly underestimate the costs of adaptation to climate change, the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the residual loss and damage that climate change will cause.

中文翻译：

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气候变化的成本比我们想象的要高，因为人们的适应能力比我们想象的要少

摘要 人类行为通常在适应气候变化的经济模型中得到优化。这些模型假设人们在受财务和技术限制的情况下为最大化利润而工作。实际上，这些模型模拟了适应性潜力。实际上，适应能力没有达到这种潜力。这种不足被概念化为适应不足，它引起了越来越多的关注。这项研究证明了人们在现实世界中的适应性行为与纯粹优化下假设的行为背道而驰的方式的影响。这些偏差被称为适应约束，基于新西兰的一个实证案例研究被正式化为数值偏好函数，它们用于约束基于代理的气候变化适应模型。我们表明，这些经验指定的适应约束相对于优化的规范减少了大约三分之一的利润。这表明不受约束的经济模型可能会大大低估适应气候变化的成本、减少温室气体排放的好处以及气候变化将造成的剩余损失和损害。