Economic complexity and the resilience-sustainability strategy for climate change

• We test the hypothesis that greater economic complexity is associated with increased resilience to climate change. • Our results show that economic complexity is positively associated with climate resilience. • More complex economies tend to be less vulnerable to climate change because of their stronger adaptive and coping capacities. • Climate risk and complexity are positively linked only at extreme exposure. Previous development studies have documented a positive relationship between economic complexity and better environmental outcomes. Building on this perspective, our empirical study demonstrates that economic complexity is also strongly linked to climate change resilience. Using recent advances in causal and explainable machine learning, we show that more complex economies tend to be less vulnerable to climate change because of their stronger adaptive and coping capacities. Our findings further reveal a positive association between exposure to climate risk due to geography and complexity, but only at extreme levels of exposure. While exposure to climate change itself lies beyond the reach of policy intervention, vulnerability does not. By combining an economic complexity framework with investments in knowledge-intensive intangibles and large-scale, long-term health interventions, policymakers, especially in developing nations, can align the seemingly divergent goals of climate resilience and decarbonization, thereby advancing a coherent resilience–sustainability strategy for climate change.