The economic commitment of climate change

Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons. In this publication, researchers use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes.

The publication has the following takeaways:

• The world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty);
• These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices;
• Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity;
• Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits.