New report on costs of US climate change inaction

Written by Sturle Hauge Simonsen

Sunday, 01 June 2008 02:00

Climate damage will cost the US $1.9 trillion by 2100 if current business-as-usual conditions prevail.

In the report The Cost of Climate Change: What We’ll Pay if Global Warming Continues Unchecked, researchers Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton have studied the costs for the US economy if no action is taken to limit climate change.

Dramatic costs under business-as-usual conditions
Commissioned by the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC), this report presents both a detailed analysis of four major categories of climate costs, and comprehensive modeling of climate impacts on the economy as a whole.

The detailed analysis shows that under business-as-usual conditions with no new climate policies, the four cost categories – increased hurricane damages, residential real estate losses due to sea level rise, increased energy costs, and water supply costs – will cost $1.9 trillion (in today’s dollars), or 1.8 percent of U.S. output per year by 2100.

The comprehensive modeling employs the PAGE model, used in the Stern Review. A revised version of the PAGE forecasts, created for this study, projects even greater impacts, as much as 3.6 percent of U.S. GDP, or $3.8 trillion in today’s dollars, by 2100. Even this larger figure is probably an underestimate, since some important impacts cannot be adequately captured in the model’s calculations.

Contributing authors to the study are Jeremy Fisher and Bruce Biewald of Synapse Energy Economics, for the energy analysis, and Chris Hope and Stephan Alberth of Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, for the PAGE modeling.

Download The Cost of Climate Change: What We’ll Pay if Global Warming Continues Unchecked report here.