The real cost of climate change: Global warming could make the average person 40% poorer by 2100,...
The cost of will be almost four times higher than we thought, a new study has warned. Scientists from the University of South Wales warn that just 4C (7.2F) of warming will make the average person 40 per cent poorer by 2100. And it's particularly bad news for Britons, who will be 46.5 per cent poorer, according to the researchers. Even if global warming is capped at just 2C (3.6F), the researchers found that global GDP per person - a measure of economic output - will fall by 16 per cent. That is a huge increase from more conservative estimates, which suggested 2C (3.6F) of warming would lead to a 1.4 per cent decrease in GDP. As scientists predict that , this means climate change is likely to make the average person significantly poorer. The reason these costs are so much higher than earlier predictions is that the researchers have taken the impact of global weather into account for the first time. Lead author Dr Timothy Neal says: 'Because these damages haven't been taken into account, prior economic models have inadvertently concluded that even severe climate change wasn't a big problem for the economy and it's had profound implications for climate policy.' In the past, when economists wanted to understand how climate change would affect the economy, they tended to assume that only the weather happening inside a given country affected it. So they would look at the costs of floods or droughts in a country, but not at wider disruptions happening around the globe. However, this approach has been criticised for not taking into account just how interconnected the world's economies really are. Dr Neal explained: 'It is commonplace for the goods and services that people buy at the supermarket or department store to be sourced from all over the world, and goods from multiple countries might have been used to make a single manufactured product that ends up in a store. 'What this implies is that extreme weather that impacts one part of the world has implications for economies elsewhere in the world.' Research shows as a direct result of the climate warming. Warmer air can hold more water and more energy, which means Recent studies have shown that some parts of the world even experience an intensification of both wet and dry extremes While the Earth has experienced warm periods in the geological past, the climate is now This means that national economies are likely to face more disruption from extreme weather events if climate change continues. If these disruptions happen in multiple countries at once - especially during particularly hot years - the impacts spill over to create 'cascading supply chain disruptions' all around the world. Dr Neal says: 'Previous models sometimes suggested that richer or cooler countries, such as the UK, will be significantly less affected than developing countries and some might even benefit.' However, that notion relied on the assumption that weather conditions overseas were irrelevant to local economic success. 'What the results from our paper suggest is that what really matters for future economic growth in the UK under climate change is not only how climate change will change UK weather, but also how it will change all of the UK's trading partners,' says Dr Neal. For example, since the UK imports a large amount of its fresh fruit and vegetables from Spain, would have a knock-on effect for British food industries. According to the researchers, these findings completely change the calculations for the cost of making the economy greener. A previous economic model, known as DICE 2023, predicted that allowing 2.7C (4.9F) of climate change would roughly balance the costs of action against the costs of inaction. However, using a model that considers global weather, that figure drops to 1.7C (3F), which is consistent with the targets of the Paris Agreement. This means that reducing emissions and fighting climate change is in everyone's economic interest and will make the average person richer by the end of the century. Dr Neal says: 'Accordingly, we argue that the costs of allowing climate change to continue far exceed the costs of decarbonisation.'