Galiana and Green conclude that increased funding for low-carbon research and development would have benefits ranging from threeto 11 times higher than the cost, depending on the rate of success and time horizon.
But what can we achieve by preparing ourselves for climate damage? Carlo Carraro, Francesco Bosello, and Enrica De Cian look at what can be achieved with adaptation policies.
They find that the most important impacts of global warming will be on agriculture and tourism, where nations will lose, on average, about one-half of 1 percent of GDP from each by midcentury. However, they point out that much of this damage will actually be avoided by people choosing for themselves to adapt to the change in their environment. Farmers will choose plants that thrive in the heat. New houses will be designed to deal with warmer temperatures.
Taking this into account, rich countries will adapt to the negative impacts of global warming and exploit the positive changes, actually creating a total positive effect of global warming worth about one-half a percentage point of GDP.
However, poor countries will be hit harder. Adaptation will reduce the climate-change-related losses from 5 percent of GDP to slightly less than 3 percent, but this is still a significant negative impact. The real challenge of global warming, therefore, lies in tackling its impact on developing nations. Here, more needs to be done, above and beyond the adaptation that will happen naturally.
Adaptation may serve multiple purposes, including helping developing countries to boost education, health, and economic development.
The researchers find that, broadly, every dollar spent on adaptation would achieve at least about $1.65 worth of positive changes for the planet.
The final paper, by J. Eric Bickel and Lee Lane, looks at geo engineering This essentially means cooling the planet by reflecting more of the sun’s rays back to space. There are a few different ways to achieving this. One promising approach is stratospheric aerosol injection—where a precursor of sulfur dioxide would be continuously injected into the stratosphere, forming a thin layer of aerosols to reflect sunlight. The amount of sulfur required to offset global warming is on the order of 2 percent of the sulfur that humans already inject into the atmosphere, largely through burning fossil fuels. Another suggested approach is marine cloud whitening, where seawater would be mixed into the atmosphere at sea to make the clouds slightly whiter and more reflective.
Bickel and Lane do not suggest actually implementing such programs at this point, but they look at the costs and benefits of preparing the knowledge of how they might be deployed in the future. They estimate that the cost of a climate-engineering research and development program is on the order of $1 billion: a small fraction of what the United States alone is spending on climate-change research each year. They estimate that each dollar spent could create roughly $1,000 of benefits in economic terms.
Such high benefits reflect the fact that solar radiation management holds the potential of reducing the economic damages caused by both warming and costly CO2 reduction measures (such as carbon taxes). These early-reduction costs tend to be higher than those of climate change; so by lessening the stringency of controls, climate-engineering may also provide near-term benefits—compared to strategies relying solely on emissions reductions.
Moreover, if climate change should suddenly get much worse (reaching the so-called ”tipping points”), geoengineering appears to be the only technology that could quickly cool the Earth. This feature would allow it to act as an insurance against extreme and highly uncertain climate outcomes.
The four papers reveal four different paths to resolving the challenge of climate change. Do you think one or more of these should be given a high priority by policymakers? Have your say in our daily poll:
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In this series, Bjorn Lomborg explores the smartest investments to respond to global challenges—and readers get to have their say. See the earlier articles here. And read Bjorn’s responses to readers and find out which investments are currently at the top of Slate readers’ priority list. Be sure to vote in the poll at the bottom of each article.