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The authors have retracted this paper for the following reasons: post-publication, the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995–1999. Furthermore, spatial auto-correlation was argued to be relevant for the uncertainty ranges. The authors corrected the data from Uzbekistan for 1995–1999 and controlled for data source transitions and higher-order trends as present in the Uzbekistan data. They also accounted for spatial auto-correlation. These changes led to discrepancies in the estimates for climate damages by mid-century, with an increased uncertainty range (from 11–29% to 6–31%) and a lower probability of damages diverging across emission scenarios by 2050 (from 99% to 90%).
The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction, leading to the retraction of the paper. An updated version of the paper with these changes, which has yet to undergo peer review, is publicly available with continued open access to its data and methodology (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15984134). The authors intend to submit a revised version of the paper for peer review. If and when published, this retraction note will be updated to include a link to the new publication. The authors appreciate the corrective role of the global scientific community and thank Thomas Bearpark, Dylan Hogan, Solomon Hsiang and Christof Schötz for bringing these issues to their attention. All authors agree to this retraction.
Climate change: Economic costs associated with climate change
The global economy could experience an average income reduction of 19% by 2049, reports a study published in Nature. These new models shed further light on the potential consequences of unrestrained carbon emissions and suggest that these will not be felt evenly across the world.
Projections of the economic damage of climate change are crucial to the adaptation and planning procedures of both public and private entities. However, models are often limited by the daunting and variable nature of long-term climate outcomes. Leonie Wenz and colleagues model the potential effects of climate scenarios on economic productivity using local temperature and precipitation data from more than 1,600 regions worldwide in combination with climate and income data from the previous 40 years and climate projections.
The projections indicate that due to previous emmisions, the world economy will experience an income reduction of 19% by 2049 in comparison to a baseline with no climate change impacts. These estimated damages would already outweigh the costs associated with limiting warming in accordance with the Paris Climate Agreement by six times, highlighting the monetary benefits of mitigation in the second half of the century. These damages are primarily attributed to temperature variation; however, the authors posit that the consideration of additional climate variables raises estimates by a further 50%. In addition, countries with the lowest income and lowest historical emissions are predicted to suffer income loss that is 61% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries, suggesting that further warming will exacerbate the effects of climate injustice.
These figures suggest that the world economy is on course to suffer significant damage from human-caused climate change, with the lowest-income countries the most vulnerable to income loss.
Expert Reaction
These comments have been collated by the Science Media Centre to provide a variety of expert perspectives on this issue. Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. Views expressed are the personal opinions of the experts named. They do not represent the views of the SMC or any other organisation unless specifically stated.
Professor Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Victoria University of Wellington
The authors of this paper clearly show that the transition to sustainable energy sources is significantly less costly than the cost we are already ‘committed’ to bearing by our past greenhouse emissions, so we would have been much better off had we not delayed climate action for so long.
Overall, however, this kind of modelling approach is not suitable to conclude much about the costs of climate change at the local level for us in Aotearoa. This approach does not account for the local peculiarities of our economic activities (in our case, for example, that the Waikato region is much more exposed to changes in heat and rainfall than Auckland because of its different set of economic activities).
But, the fact we cannot conclude much from this work about the local impact does not detract from the main message, that we should rapidly converge to a net-zero world. Afterall, the argument for us, and for everyone else around the world, to work toward net zero is not that our actions matter locally, but that it is their global impact that is the reason for the urgency we need to adopt.
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