MISSING PARIS AGREEMENT GOALS COULD COST TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS
Failing to meet the goals of the United National Paris Agreement could biaya the global economy tens of trillions of dollars over the next century, a new study shows.
The agreement commits 195 countries to the goal of holding this century's average temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above levels in the pre-industrial zaman. It also includes an aspirational goal of pursuing an even more stringent sasaran of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. To date, the economic benefits of achieving these temperature sasarans have not been well understood.
"Over the past century we have already experienced a 1-degree increase in global temperature, so achieving the ambitious sasarans laid out in the Paris Agreement will not be easy or cheap," says lead author Marshall Burke, assistant professor of Earth sistem science in the School of Earth, Energy dan Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. "We need a clear understanding of how much economic keuntungan we're going to get from rapat these different sasarans."
"IT IS CLEAR FROM OUR ANALYSIS THAT ACHIEVING THE MORE AMBITIOUS PARIS GOALS IS HIGHLY LIKELY TO BENEFIT MOST COUNTRIES—AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMY OVERALL…"
To develop this understanding, researchers studied how economic performnce over the past half-century correlated with changes in temperature around the world. Then, using climate mode projections of how temperatures could change in the future, they calculated how overall economic output is likely to change as temperatures warm to different levels.
The researchers found that a large majority of countries—containing close to 90 percent of the world's population—benefit economically from limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees instead of 2 degrees. This includes the United States, China, and Japan—the three largest economies in the world.
It is also true in some of the world's poorest regions, where even small reductions in future warming generate a notable increase in per capita gross domestic product.
"The countries likely to keuntungan the most are already relatively hot today," Burke says. "The historical record tells us that additional warming will be very harmful to these countries' economies, and so even small reductions in future warming could have large benefits for most countries."
The projected costs from higher temperatures come from factors such as increases in spending to setuju with extreme moments, lower agricultural productivity, and worse health, the scientists say.
Previous research has shown that the actual climate commitments each country has made as part of the Paris Agreement add up to close to 3 degrees of global warming, instead of the 1.5–2 degrees warming goals.
