Compared to every other country in the world, the US is bearing the biggest brunt of the economic losses inflicted by climate breakdown – and will likely continue to do so.
That’s according to a recent study from Stanford University, in which scientists calculated the economic loss and damages caused by major fossil fuel emitters.
Lead author Marshall Burke, professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford, told BBC Science Focus that the study aimed to find a way to link specific emissions to their economic consequences.
“This ‘loss and damage’ is a part of climate change that we don’t like to talk about,” he said. “The global community had been discussing it for years, but resisted formally defining the concept – or trying to systematically estimate whose emissions were causing damage to which countries. Our goal was to fill that gap.”
Notably, the scientists estimated the US to be the largest emitter of greenhouse gases between 1990 and 2020, responsible for $10.2 trillion (£7.6 trillion) of global harm.
But they also concluded that the US had suffered the most substantial losses of any country, valued at $16.2 trillion (£12.2 trillion), due to climate collapse.
“The US has experienced more [financial] damage than it has caused since 1990, even though its emissions were the biggest source of damage,” said Burke.
“That’s because the US’s economy is relatively larger than its share in global emissions. So, it has caused a lot of harm, but also been substantially harmed.”
But US emissions have caused significant harm elsewhere too. For instance, the scientists estimated that $1.4 trillion (£1.1 trillion) of this damage fell on the European Union’s shoulders, as well as $500 billion (£375 billion) on India and $330 billion (£250 billion) on Brazil.
“We want to emphasise just how large these numbers are,” said Burke. “The estimated damages that have already occurred [from climate change] are in the tens of trillions of dollars.”
After the US, the EU was estimated to have endured the second-largest economic hit, valued at $6.4 trillion (£4.8 trillion). This is despite being the third biggest emitter (causing $6.42 trillion, or £4.85 trillion, of damage), coming after China at $8.7 trillion (£6.5 trillion).
In comparison, the scientists estimated that the UK had caused $1.1 trillion (£830 billion) of damage and experienced $880 billion (£660 billion) in losses.
This creator-receiver dynamic, the authors wrote, is similar to a household producing waste: you toss away your rubbish, a lorry comes to collect it, then the lorry disposes of it in a landfill somewhere else.
In this scenario, the waste is carbon dioxide. This study traced who created the waste, where it went and who had to deal with it in the end.
The key tool here was gross domestic product (GDP), which helped the researchers estimate how climate change affects agriculture, health, workplace productivity and other economic factors.
Fluctuations in temperature, Burke explained, are known to have massive impacts on the global economy. “What our paper does is tie these impacts to upstream emissions from emitters around the world.”
But carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn’t like your waste, quietly rotting in landfill; it becomes much more problematic over time.
“Future damages from past emissions are much larger than past damages from past emissions,” said Burke.
“So long as that carbon stays in the atmosphere, damage keeps occurring, and the damage that occurs over the next century is substantially larger than what has already occurred.”
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