Influence of climate change impacts and mitigation costs on inequality between countries
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Influence of climate change impacts and mitigation costs on inequality between countries 2 · Celine ´ Mejean ´ ´ Nicolas Taconet1 · Aurelie Guivarch1
Received: 6 May 2019 / Revised: 15 October 2019 / Accepted: 17 December 2019 / © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Climate change affects inequalities between countries in two ways. On the one hand, rising temperatures from greenhouse gas accumulation cause impacts that fall more heavily on low-income countries. On the other hand, the costs of mitigating climate change through reduced emissions could slow down the economic catch-up of poor countries. Whether, and how much the recent decline in between-country inequalities will continue in the twentyfirst century is uncertain, and the existing projections rarely account for climate factors. In this study, we build scenarios that account for the joint effects of mitigation costs and climate damages on inequality. We compute the evolution of country-by-country GDP, considering uncertainty in socioeconomic assumptions, emission pathways, mitigation costs, temperature response, and climate damages. We analyze the resulting 3408 scenarios using exploratory analysis tools. We show that the uncertainties associated with socioeconomic assumptions and damage estimates are the main drivers of future inequalities. We investigate under which conditions the cascading effects of these uncertainties can counterbalance the projected convergence of countries’ incomes. We also compare inequality levels across emission pathways and analyze when the effect of climate damages on inequality outweigh that of mitigation costs. We stress the divide between IAM- and econometrics-based damage functions in terms of their effect on inequality. If climate damages are as regressive as the latter suggest, climate mitigation policies are key to limit the rise of future inequalities between countries. Keywords Climate change · Inequality · Gini · Scenario analysis · Climate mitigation · Socioeconomic scenario · Climate change impact
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02637-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Nicolas Taconet
[email protected] 1
Ecole des Ponts, CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le D´eveloppement, 45 bis Avenue de la Belle Gabrielle, 94736 Nogent-sur-Marne Cedex, France
2
CNRS, CIRED - Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le D´eveloppement, 45 bis Avenue de la Belle Gabrielle, 94736 Nogent-sur-Marne Cedex, France
Climatic Change
1 Introduction Income inequalities between countries have declined in recent decades notably as a result of rapid economic growth in China and India (Firebaugh 2015; Milanovic 2016). Most projections see inequalities continuing along this dwindling path throughout the twentyfirst century (Hellebrandt and Mauro 2015; Riahi et al. 2017; OECD 2018; Rodrik 2011; Hawksworth and Tiwari 2011; Spence 2011). However, they do not consider the impa
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