Reacción a "Historical carbon emissions will generate greater economic costs in the future than they have already caused to date"

This is a high-quality study addressing a crucial issue, the present and future economic impact of climate change, which has not received attention commensurate with its importance and socio-economic implications within the social sciences. The study examines the effects of ‘historical’ emissions (with 1990 as the baseline year for international climate agreements) on both current and future economic outcomes (looking ahead to 2100), and finds these impacts to be greater than previously estimated.

The major problem with the current process of climate change is that it is progressing faster than early 21st-century models and projections anticipated. Rather than declining, greenhouse gas emissions have increased and continue to do so. They are expected to keep rising for at least the next decade. As a result, the economic impact is likely to exceed the estimates provided by recent studies. Any assessment of climate change’s economic effects, particularly with a view to incorporating them into future international agreements, will need to account both for the damage caused by extreme weather events in specific regions or countries and for the cumulative effects of emissions, using approaches such as the one proposed in this study.

It is essential that Article 9 of the Paris Agreement be implemented urgently and that the planned $300 billion in climate finance be mobilised, transferring resources from wealthier nations to less developed ones. This should require all countries, especially the richest, to allocate a fixed share of their GDP annually (at least 1 %) to tackling climate change (both mitigation and adaptation) and to funding the Paris Agreement (Article 9), if the socio-economic impacts expected in the near future, both domestically and globally, are to be reduced.

In summary, this study represents an important contribution to assessing the economic impact of greenhouse gas emissions, which are directly responsible for the current process of climate change driven by a human-induced imbalance in the Earth’s energy budget. This imbalance is leading to sustained atmospheric warming and increased energy in impactful weather events. As the process is advancing more rapidly than previously estimated, urgent economic and policy decisions are required, both to compensate the most affected countries and to prepare global economies for the emerging climate reality.