Impact of climate on economy’s overall wealth

Here’s a note from David Carlin:

Climate change is already making us poorer, even in strong mitigation scenarios, where incomes are 19% lower than in no climate change scenarios. However, mitigation actions today are also the best investment we can make in our future, offering major returns in harms avoided.

A great paper in Nature explored the economic impacts of future climate change by examining hundreds of regions and their historical damages due to temperature and precipitation. The findings help to put numbers on the notoriously tricky problem of estimating the economic impacts of climate change. These impacts are most damaging and pronounced in developing and tropical states. In addition, given that the scope of the analysis did not consider all direct and indirect harms of climate change, it may even be an underestimate.