The authors of a study looking at the potential impact of climate change on the global economy said on Wednesday that data errors led to a slight overestimation of the decline in income over the next 25 years.
Researchers from Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have written Nature magazine in 2024He predicted a 19% drop in income by 2050. Their revised studies put the figure at 17%.
The authors also said in their original work that there was a 99% chance that, by half a century, repairing the damage from climate change would cost more than building resilience. Their new analysis, not yet peer-reviewed, dropped that figure to 91%.
The Associated Press reported on the original investigation. Nature has published a setback that Wednesday.
The researchers cited data inaccuracies in the first paper, particularly under Uzbekistan’s economic data between 1995 and 1999, that had a significant impact on the results, and that their analysis underestimated statistical uncertainty.
Max Kotz, one of the study’s authors, told the AP that the bottom line of the study remains the same: climate change will disproportionately harm the global economy if left unchecked, and it will hit the hardest in the lowest-income areas that contribute the least amount of global warming emissions.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who was not involved in the research, said the momentum of the Potsdam Institute’s work remains the same “no matter what fraction of the actual figure.”
“Climate change is already hitting home, literally. Home insurance premiums in the U.S. have already doubled in size over the past decade,” Wagner said. “The rapid accumulation of climate risks will push the numbers even higher.”