A meta-analysis of the total economic impact of climate change

TL;DR

This meta-analysis updates previous estimates of climate change's economic impact, confirming it is generally negative with wide uncertainty, and highlights greater vulnerability of poorer countries and differing impacts based on study methods.

Contribution

It provides an updated, comprehensive meta-analysis of climate change's economic impact, incorporating new data and comparing different elicitation and econometric methods.

Findings

Central estimate of impact is negative.

Uncertainty intervals are wider than before.

Poorer countries are more vulnerable.

Abstract

Earlier meta-analyses of the economic impact of climate change are updated with more data, with three new results: (1) The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative. (2) The confidence interval about the estimates is much wider. (3) Elicitation methods are most pessimistic, econometric studies most optimistic. Two previous results remain: (4) The uncertainty about the impact is skewed towards negative surprises. (5) Poorer countries are much more vulnerable than richer ones. A meta-analysis of the impact of weather shocks reveals that studies, which relate economic growth to temperature levels, cannot agree on the sign of the impact whereas studies, which make economic growth a function of temperature change do agree on the sign but differ an order of magnitude in effect size. The former studies posit that climate change has a permanent effect on economic growth, the latter that the effect is transient. The impact on economic growth implied by studies of the impact of climate change is close to the growth impact estimated as a function of weather shocks. The social cost of carbon shows a similar pattern to the total impact estimates, but with more emphasis on the impacts of moderate warming in the near and medium term.