The damage climate change will inflict on the world’s economy is likely to have been massively underestimated, according to new research by my colleagues and I which accounts for the full global reach of extreme weather and its aftermath. To date, projections of how climate change will affect global gross domestic product (GDP) have broadly suggested mild to moderate harm. This in part has led to a lack of urgency in national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, these models often contain a fundamental flaw – they assume a national economy is affected only by weather in that country. Any impacts from weather events elsewhere, such as how flooding in one country affects the food supply to another, are not incorporated into the models. Our new research sought to fix this. After including the global repercussions of extreme weather into our models, the predicted harm to global GDP became far worse than previously thought – affecting the lives of people in every country on Earth. New analysis shows how climate change will affect people in all countries. Weather shocks everywhere, all at once Global warming affects economies in many ways. The most obvious is damage from extreme weather. Droughts can cause poor harvests, while storms and floods can cause widespread destruction and disrupt the supply of goods. Recent research has also shown heatwaves, aggravated by climate change, have contributed to food inflation. Heat also makes workers less productive . It affects human health , and disease transmission , and can cause mass migration and conflict . Most prior research predicts that even extreme warming of 4°C will have only mild negative impacts on the global economy by the end of the century – between 7% and 23% . Such modelling is usually based on the effects of weather […]