[Retracted] Global income could decrease by 19% in two decades due to climate change
[This article has been retracted by Nature on December 3, 2025]. The global economy could lose, on average, 19% of income by 2049 due to increased carbon emissions over the past four decades, says an analysis published in Nature. To estimate the future economic damages of climate change, the authors used temperature and precipitation data for 1,600 regions worldwide in the past 40 years. Low-income countries will be more affected by these losses than higher-income countries, the authors warn.
The authors of the study have decided to retract the article published on April 17, 2024, in the journal Nature. Following publication, they corrected, in particular, the data for Uzbekistan for the period 1995-1999, according to Nature's retraction note. “These changes led to discrepancies in mid-century climate damage estimates, with an increase in the uncertainty range (from 11-29% to 6-31%) and a lower probability of damage diverging between different emission scenarios for 2050 (from 99% to 90%).” We are preserving the expert reactions gathered by the SMC at the time of publication to leave a record of this story.
coste clima - Ana Iglesias EN
Ana Iglesias
Researcher at the Research Centre for the Management of Agricultural and Environmental Risks (CEIGRAM)
This is an excellent and rigorous study, that supplements previous work and is in line with the best current research.
The study could have a big impact to [help] design our adaptation plans -both at a national and local level- with ethics and environmental justice in mind. But it is uncertain in how society might respond in terms of consumption (especially energy consumption), and that also has be taken into account.
coste clima - Ilan Noy EN
Ilan Noy
Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)
The authors of this paper clearly show that the transition to sustainable energy sources is significantly less costly than the cost we are already ‘committed’ to bearing by our past greenhouse emissions, so we would have been much better off had we not delayed climate action for so long.
Overall, however, this kind of modelling approach is not suitable to conclude much about the costs of climate change at the local level [...]. This approach does not account for the local peculiarities of our economic activities [...].
But, the fact we cannot conclude much from this work about the local impact does not detract from the main message, that we should rapidly converge to a net-zero world. Afterall, the argument for us, and for everyone else around the world, to work toward net zero is not that our actions matter locally, but that it is their global impact that is the reason for the urgency we need to adopt.
Maximilian Kotz et al.
- Research article
- Peer reviewed
- Modelling
