It’s been hot there. Such as breaking water pipes, slowing trains, searing corn, nodding the road – not to mention the effects of heat on the human body, making it more difficult to work in construction and grow crops. to harvest.
That should all factor into the gross domestic product for the second quarter, right?
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it’s very difficult to track that impact in real time, but economists are working to do better.
For more than a decade, researchers have been making predictions about the likely economic impact of climate change. For example, a 2018 article found that the annual growth rate of economic output at the state level fell by 0.15 to 0.25 percentage points for every degree that the average temperature crept higher in the summer — adding up to a third of economic growth over the next few years. could decrease. century. And that’s only in the United States.
However, those estimates benefit from long-term data sets that allow analysts to compare the effects of temperature and extreme weather events over time. They also tend to project further into the future, which generally produces more dazzling results, and is more relevant for evaluating the effects of policy interventions designed to curb emissions.
“As a profession, we’ve really focused on future economic impacts of climate change because we’ve focused on how you should tax carbon emissions,” said Derek Lemoine, an associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona. “We’re less focused on what climate change is already doing, in part because we didn’t realize it was going to happen so quickly.”
But dr. Lemoine is working to do just that, aiming to estimate how climate change affects the economy at almost the same time that statistics such as GDP are being compiled.
Other researchers are working to develop measures for economic growth that integrate not only the production of goods and services – which themselves can accelerate climate change – but also ecological and social elements.
