Study Provides Scientific Basis for Climate Change Reparations

When we talk about the economy and climate change, it’s usually around issues like job losses or gains as we try to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy. Or we talk about how we’re going to fund climate solutions. But a new study out from Dartmouth College has found that there is firm ground on which to quantify income losses around the world because of climate change.

This means that there is now evidence that can be used by countries who want to sue the heaviest polluters in the world: the United States, China, Brazil, Russia, and India. Collectively, between 1990 and 2014, emissions from these countries caused global income losses of $6 trillion, the study found. The United States and China alone are responsible for $1.8 trillion of these losses.

“This research provides an answer to the question of whether there is a scientific basis for climate liability claims — the answer is yes,” Christopher Callahan, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

There are a number of ways that climate change can affect income levels. Warming often means inhospitable agricultural conditions. Crops like corn, soybean, wheat, rice, cotton, and oats do not grow well in extreme heat. Flooding, fires, and droughts will also ruin farms, as will an uptick in plant-destroying bugs, like locusts. Productivity tends to drop in extreme weather. Tourism can decrease.

“And as farmers struggle to stay afloat by finding ways to adapt to changing conditions, prices will likely increase and be passed along to consumers,” writes Renee Cho, a staff writer for the Columbia Climate School.

A report from the Swiss Re Institute, a reinsurance company, warns that the global economy could lose 10 percent of its total economic value by 2050 if the planet stays on its warming trajectory.

And, of course, “some places are much more exposed to economic damages from climate change than are other places; the same increase in atmospheric carbon concentration will cause larger per capita damages in India than in Iceland,” writes the Brookings Institution. “Several of the regions that contribute relatively little to the climate change problem — regions with relatively low per capita emissions — nevertheless suffer relatively high climate damages per capita.”

According to Brookings, the economies affected most by climate change will be in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia — all of which are victims of U.S. emissions.

As for the United States, in the past 40 years there have been 300 weather and climate-related disasters that resulted in more than $1 billion in losses each, Donald L. Griffin, a vice president at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, told The New York Times in 2021. But the U.S. is suffering primarily because it has contributed so much pollution to the atmosphere.

“The responsibility for the warming rests primarily with a handful of major emitters, and this warming has resulted in the enrichment of a few wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest people in the world,” said Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth and the senior researcher of the study.

“This is about the culpability of one country to another country, not the effect of overall global warming on a country,” Callahan added.