This story includes details on the impacts of climate change that may be difficult for some readers. If you are feeling overwhelmed by this crisis situation here is a list of resources on how to cope with fears and feelings about the scope and pace of the climate crisis.
Climate change will reduce future global income by about US$38 trillion per year by 2049 compared to a fictional world that’s not warming, with the poorest areas and those least responsible for heating the atmosphere taking the biggest monetary hit, a new study said.
Climate change’s economic bite in how much people make is already locked in at about 19% in the next 25 years, according to Wednesday’s study in the journal Nature by researchers at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
By 2100 the financial cost could hit twice what previous studies estimate, The Associated Press reports.
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a climate scientist and economist.
These damages are compared to a baseline of no climate change and are then applied against overall expected global growth in gross domestic product, said climate scientist and lead author Max Kotz. So while global incomes will be 19% less than they could have been with no climate change, in most places they’ll still grow—just not as much because of warmer temperatures.
This week, the global financial and transportation hub of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, got a taste of those impacts when a “rain bomb” dropped more than two years’ worth of precipitation on the UAE and other Gulf states in 24 hours.
“By bringing the city to a standstill, the floods demonstrated how inadequate existing infrastructure is for withstanding extreme weather events that are becoming more common and severe due to climate change,” Axios reports. In a desert city with poor drainage, “cars, including luxury vehicles the city is known for, turned into boats, and planes at Dubai International Airport were seen on social media using their engine power to blast through high waters.”
For the past dozen years, AP writes, scientists and others have been focusing on extreme weather such as heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms as having the biggest climate impact. But when it comes to the financial hit, the researchers found “the overall impacts are still mainly driven by average warming, overall temperature increases,” that harm crops and hinder labour production, Kotz said.
“Those temperature increases drive the most damages in the future because they’re really the most unprecedented compared to what we’ve experienced historically,” he explained. Last year, a record-hot year, the global average temperature was 1.35°C/2.43°F warmer than pre-industrial times, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The globe has not had a month cooler than the 20th century average since February, 1979.
In the United States, the southeastern and southwestern states get economically pinched more than the northern ones, with parts of Arizona and New Mexico taking the biggest monetary hit, according to the study. In Europe, southern regions, including parts of Spain and Italy, get hit harder than places like Denmark or northern Germany.
Only Arctic circumpolar countries—Canada, Russia, Norway, Finland, and Sweden—derive any superficial economic benefit, Kotz said.
It also means countries which have historically produced fewer greenhouse gas emissions per person and are least able to financially adapt to warming weather face the biggest financial harms, Kotz said.
Income losses in the world’s poorest countries will be 61% higher than in the richest ones, the study calculated.
“It underlies some of the injustice elements of climate,” Kotz said.
This new study looked deeper than past research, examining 1,600 global areas that are smaller than countries, took several climate factors into account, and examined how long climate economic shocks last, Kotz told AP. The study examined past economic impacts on average per capita GDP and used computer simulations to look into the future.
The study concludes that the economic harms over the next 25 years are locked in, with emission cuts producing only small changes in income reductions. But in the second half of this century, two different possible futures emerge, showing that cutting carbon emissions now really pays off because of how the heat-trapping gases accumulate, Kotz said.
(While most climate science assumes a long lead time between emission cuts and actual reductions in global warming, some research indicates that fast decarbonization could begin to stabilize temperatures in as little as three to four years.)
Kotz said that if the world could curb carbon pollution and limit warming to 2°C/3.6°F above pre-industrial times, the upper limit laid out in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the financial hit would stay around 20% of global income. In a worst case scenario, the financial wallop would be closer to 60%.
That shows that the public shouldn’t see climate change as a financial “doomsday” about which nothing can be done, he said.
Still, it’s worse than a 2015 study that predicted a worst-case income hit of about 25% by the end of the century.
Marshall Burke, the Stanford University climate economist who wrote the 2015 study, said the new finding that the economic damage ahead is locked in and large “makes a lot of sense.”
Burke, who wasn’t part of the new study, said he has some issues with some of the technical calculations “so I wouldn’t put a tonne of weight on their specific numerical estimates. But I think the big picture is basically right.”
The conclusions are on the high end compared to other recent studies, but since climate change will continue for a long time and economic damage from higher temperatures keep compounding, they “add up to very large numbers,” said University of California Davis economist and environmental studies professor Frances Moore, who wasn’t part of the study. That’s why fighting climate change clearly passes economists’ tests of costs versus benefits, she added.
The main body of this report was published by The Associated Press and republished by The Canadian Press on April 17, 2024.
