This will be the economic impact of climate change in 2049

UNITED STATES (AP).-Climate change will reduce global income by 19% over the next 25 years compared to a fictional world without warming, with the poorest areas and those least responsible for atmospheric warming taking the biggest economic hit, according to according to a new study.

The economic share of climate change in people’s incomes has already been set at around $38 trillion a year by 2049, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. , a German institution. By 2100, the financial cost could be double what has been estimated in previous studies.

“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause enormous economic damage over the next 25 years in almost every country in the world, and also in highly developed countries such as Germany and the United States, with a projected average reduction in income of 11% in each one of those countries, and 13% in France,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, climatologist and economist.

These damages are compared to a baseline without climate change and then applied against expected overall global growth in gross domestic product, said the study’s lead author, climatologist Max Kotz. So, while income is 19% lower on a global scale than it could have been without climate change, in most places it will continue to grow, but not by much due to rising temperatures.

For the past dozen years, scientists and other professionals have focused on extreme weather, such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms, because they have the greatest climate impact. But regarding the economic impact, the researchers found that “the overall impacts are still primarily driven by average warming and temperature increases in general,” Kotz said. This hurts crops and production at work, he said.

“Those increases in temperature drive the most damage going forward because they are really the least unprecedented compared to what we’ve experienced historically,” Kotz said. Last year, which reached record levels of heat, the average global temperature was 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.43 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial times, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). . The world has not had a cooler than average month in the 20th century since February 1979.