This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter
It may not sound all that much to begin with. A reduction of –1.5% on gross domestic product (GDP) each year, due to the negative impacts of climate change in the Scottish Highlands, says a new report.
This isn’t like the precipitous financial crash of 2008, or the slashing of GDP by the pandemic and its lockdowns, or even Brexit. It’s a fraction of what Covid slashed off Scotland’s GDP in 2020, when it dropped by 19 percent, to boomerang back up 17% later in the year.
But it’s a loss that is predicted to stick around and rise, as the report, Climate Resilience: Economic Assessment of Climate Change Impacts, by Highland Adapts estimates, to –3.3% a year by the 2080s. It represents a persistent whittling away.
The figures have been arrived at through a review of other research, and the paper acknowledges that they depend “on the future level of warming” and that “some studies indicate potentially higher impacts than this under a worst-case scenario when catastrophic risks are included”
As such they mirror some of those that have been calculated for other countries – the United States for instance, which according to Amir Jina, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, range between 1 and 4% annually.
The........