This thesis sheds light on 1) how less-developed or developing countries can resist climate change and 2) why they fundamentally face unintended consequences of a seemingly well-designed environmental policy. More specifically, the first chapter highlights the role of emergency aid as a long-term mitigating strategy against a large-scale disaster. Using novel geospatial data on the location of relief camps, this study finds that access to emergency aid after experiencing a severe drought in childhood enhances health outcomes and labor productivity in adulthood. The second and third chapters delve into the effectiveness of the protected area policy in a dynamic setting to underline why the policy fails and how it is to be reformed. The former presents a dynamic optimization model of nonrenewable resource extraction to explain how establishing a protected area gives rise to the displacement of extraction over time. The latter empirically studies the dynamic displacement effect of new protected areas on deforestation in both protected and non-protected areas. Both chapters deliver a strong message that the establishment of protected areas pushes out extraction activities to the neighborhoods, and those activities gradually shift back to protected areas as long as the resource extracted is nonrenewable. This finding suggests that the protected area policy should be designed in light of the dynamic transition of extraction costs in both protected and non-protected areas.