Ongoing Projects

I am currently the deputy coordinator of the Horizon Europe Project CAPABLE, a collaborative project of 11 institutions across Europe. The project's key objective is to produce methodological and empirical advances in climate policy evaluation by combining insights from different disciplines. Within the project, I coordinate the work focusing on the political dynamics behind climate policy-making.

As the climate crisis worsens, it becomes increasingly important to understand how voters respond to first-hand experience of natural disasters. Conventional wisdom holds that exposure to natural disasters fosters environmental concern, thereby increasing support for green parties and candidates. Looking at the impact of wildfires on voting behavior in Brazil, we argue instead that exposure to natural disasters increases support for green candidates only when the costs of disasters outweigh their benefits. While fires have unambiguously negative environmental and health effects, their economic implications are not necessarily negative. In areas where fires destroy natural vegetation, newly ``cleared'' land may represent an opportunity for land grabbing and the expansion of agricultural and livestock production. We source satellite, administrative, and electoral data from Brazil and use it in two different identification strategies. Our results show that exposure to fires increases support for the main green candidate only in municipalities with low shares of employment in sectors that are likely to benefit from the degradation of the natural environment. Our findings shed light on the distributional implications of environmental degradation and their political consequences.