Past carbon emissions will inflict future damage: study
The skeleton of a fish is seen in the Navarro lagoon, which dried up due to the climate phenomenon La Nina, in Navarro in Argentina's Buenos Aires province on Dec. 5, 2022. (File photo: Reuters/Agustin Marcarian)
Stanford University – Economic damage caused by past carbon emissions will continue to grow going forward, with eventual losses exceeding those already inflicted even if countries cut emissions, according to a recently released study from Stanford University.
The study, published on March 25 in Nature, determined the economic impact of carbon emissions on the world and individual nations by countries and major companies. For example, U.S. emissions since 1990 have caused US$10 trillion in global economic damages.
However, only US$3 trillion of those damages were exacted onto the U.S. itself. Europe saw US$1.4 trillion lost due to U.S. emissions, as well as negative impacts of US$500 billion in India and US$330 billion in Brazil.
“It turns out U.S. emissions have really hurt U.S. output,” said lead study author Marshall Burke, a professor of environmental social sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
The U.S. also received US$16.2 trillion in economic damages from carbon emissions since 1990, including US$2.5 trillion from China, US$1 trillion from Brazil and US$389 billion from Canada.
Canada’s carbon emissions since 1990 caused US$1.3 trillion in worldwide economic damage with US$3.1 billion of damage on itself. Damages attributed to Canada also included US$156.3 billion to China, US$67.9 billion to India and US$159.7 billion to the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany and Italy combined.
Canada received US$130.1 billion of economic damage, including US$23.4 billion from the U.S. and US$20.3 billion from China.
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest corporate emitter, caused US$3 trillion in damages by 2020 from emissions expelled from 1988 to 2015. If the emissions remain in the atmosphere by 2100, the damage could grow to US$64 trillion.
“As long as a ton of emitted carbon dioxide is up there, it is causing warming and that warming is causing damage,” said Burke.
The estimates are based on the study’s framework for calculating the cost of impacts from climate change that countries can’t prevent by cutting emissions or avoiding through adaptation.
Removing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere could be a way to lower the bill. While developing new scalable technologies for greenhouse gas removal has received substantial attention in recent years, the new Stanford study shows that the timing of their deployment is critical. For example, the researchers calculate that if a ton of carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for 25 years before removal, half the damage expected from that ton has already been done.
“Our study shows that because of the compounding impacts of warming on economic growth, the time since the emissions occurred is critical for accurately accounting for the loss and damage associated with past emissions, as well as the cost-benefit analysis of potential solutions,” said study co-author Noah Diffenbaugh, the William Wrigley Professor and Kimmelman Family Senior Fellow in the Doerr School of Sustainability.
“We haven’t accounted for impacts that aren’t captured in GDP, such as loss of biodiversity and cultural homeland, and our approach also underweights some sources of climate impacts such as sea level rise and some types of extreme events,” Diffenbaugh added. “This makes our estimates conservative.”
