Global warming has increased global economic inequality

By N. Diffenbaugh, Marshall Burke. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019

733 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Significance We find that global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century. This increase results from the impact of warming on annual economic growth, which over the course of decades has accumulated robust and substantial declines in economic output in hotter, poorer countries—and increases in many cooler, wealthier countries—relative to a world without anthropogenic warming. Thus, the global warming caused by fossil fuel use has likely exacerbated the economic inequality associated with historical disparities in energy consumption. Our results suggest that low-carbon energy sources have the potential to provide a substantial secondary development benefit, in addition to the primary benefits of increased energy access. Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdbdf82c149d90c23cf60e489f1873e8d142d12a

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Citations in the corpus

The impact of climate conditions on economic production. Evidence from a global panel of regions (2020, methodology): “They have been applied to analyze the relationship between temperature and growth (Dell et al., 2009, 2012; Burke et al., 2015; Diffenbaugh and Burke, 2019), labor productivity (Deryugina and Hsiang, 2014), human capital (Graff Zivin and Neidell, 2014; Graff Zivin et al.”
Climate risks and financial stability (2021, background): “The analysis of the macroeconomic impact of climate change has received growing attention in the last decade, with a focus on the physical effects of climate change on the economy (see e.g. Noy, 2009; Burke et al., 2015; Hsiang et al., 2017; Diffenbaugh and Burke, 2019; Hallegatte, 2019).”
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning (2019, methodology): “ering. For example, [665] use deep neural networks to estimate the effects of aerosols on human health, while [666] use them to estimate the effects of solar geoengineering on agriculture. References [667, 668] use relatively simple local and polynomial regression techniques but applied to extensive”
Does rainfall matter for economic growth? Evidence from global sub-national data (1990–2014) (2019, unknown): “Following this pioneering work, recent research in the economics literature has focused upon the consequences of rising temperatures (Deryugina and Hsiang, 2017; Diffenbaugh and Burke, 2019; Henseler and Schumacher, 2019; Burke and Tanatuma, 2019).”
Land use and climate change impacts on global soil erosion by water (2015-2070) (2020, background): “Scientific evidence suggests that global warming has already increased global economic inequality (35) and influenced immigration waves (36).”