The economic cost of climate change - Dr. Leonie Wenz - University of Hamburg
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19.01.2023
The economic cost of climate change
Changing climate conditions and weather extremes can affect various fundamental elements of our economies such as labor productivity or agricultural yields – thereby posing a threat to economic prosperity and societal welfare. Estimates of the macroeconomic costs of climate change hence play an important role in climate policy debates and decisions. However, current estimates differ strongly – partly because it is unclear how resilient regions, sectors and communities are and how persistently weather extremes can thus affect them. In this talk, I will give an overview of some recent findings in this research area. Specifically, I will present insights gained from a novel data set comprising subnational income data from the past 40 years and more than 1500 regions worldwide. Based on these granular data, we have empirically estimated historic temperature and precipitation impacts at different time scales, from daily fluctuations and extremes to changes in the long-term mean. Our findings show that economic productivity is strongly affected by rainfall and temperature changes but that these effects display large spatial heterogeneity. Whereas low-income, low-latitude regions are most vulnerable to rising and erratic temperatures, increases in the number of rainy days and extreme rainfall events are most harmful in wealthy, industrialized countries. In our economically interconnected world, these local impacts can have repercussions in other parts of the work as well. I will conclude by presenting preliminary results on such spill-over effects in firm networks.
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