U.S. among top nations to suffer economic damage from climate change
“Evaluating the economic cost associated with climate is valuable on a number of fronts, as these estimates are used to inform U.S. environmental regulation and rulemakings,” said lead author, University of California San Diego assistant professor Kate Ricke, who holds joint appointments with the campus’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
For example, claims that carbon dioxide causes relatively little harm to the economy can more easily justify rollbacks on environmental regulation.
In order to model the effects of CO2 emissions on country-level temperatures, the authors use an innovative approach by combining results from several climate and carbon cycle modeling experiments to capture the magnitude and geographic pattern of warming under different greenhouse gas emission trajectories, and the carbon-cycle and climate system response to carbon emissions.
Since carbon dioxide is a global pollutant, previous analysis has focused on the global social cost of carbon; however the country-by-country breakdown of the economic damage global warming will cause that this paper presents is important for various reasons.
“Our analysis demonstrates that the argument that the primary beneficiaries of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions would be other countries is a total myth,” Ricke said. “We consistently find, through hundreds of uncertainty scenarios, that the U.S. always has one of the highest country-level SCCs. It makes a lot of sense because the larger your economy is, the more you have to lose. Still, it’s surprising just how consistently the US is one of the biggest losers, even when compared to other large economies.”
Ricke and the authors noted mapping domestic impacts of climate change can help better understand the determinants of international cooperation. The nationally-determined architecture of the Paris climate agreement—and its vulnerability to changing national interests—is one important example.
The findings point to some paradoxical behavior in the climate governance arena. While the European Union has been an international leader on climate issues, the research shows the threat levels of future warming to be much higher for counties such as the U.S. and India. These nations might be expected to take a leadership role on climate, which historically has not been the case.
The authors conclude that many countries have not yet recognized the risk posed by climate change; yet a clearer understanding of domestic impacts may play a role in incentivizing nations to join forces to act, in their own self-interest, to mitigate climate change.
Ricke’s co-authors include Laurent Drouet and Massimo Tavoni of the RFF-CMCC European Institute for Economics and the Environment as well as Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
— Read more in Katharine Ricke et al., “Country-level social cost of carbon,” Nature Climate Change (24 September 2018) (DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0282-y)
