How much will it cost to avoid deaths due to the heat caused by the climate?

For the past for some years, climate economists have used the concept of the “social cost of carbon” to measure the dollar value of the damage caused by adding every ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In February, the White House announced that government officials would study the social cost of carbon working on new environmental regulations.

Now it has been invented by a researcher mortality the cost of carbon, which includes a climate-related heat death toll. New article, published in the journal today Nature Communications, we estimate that we should avoid emitting 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to save a life. This figure is the carbon emissions generated by 3.5 Americans.

Daniel BresslerA graduate student and author of the study on sustainable development at Columbia University, he estimates that by 2050 the world economy would be “decarbonized,” meaning that eliminating carbon emissions would save 74 million lives worldwide by 2050. significant numbers of lives that can be saved by reducing emissions — on a personal scale, on a corporate scale, on a national scale, and globally, ”says Bressler.

Bressler’s research is about the problem driven by climate extreme heat, which can cause heat stroke, dehydration, and respiratory and organ failure, especially among at-risk populations such as the elderly. To invent this model, Bressler says he already started with one for the social cost of carbon developed by economist William Nordhaus at Yale University, which originally put that figure at $ 37 per tonne. He then updated the results of new research describing how climate change is affecting public health and increasing deaths due to heat. The model assumes a scenario in which industrial emissions will continue to increase until 2050 before flattening out at the end of the century.

After Bressler compared the Nordhaus model to the new climate information, “what I concluded was that less than 5% of the original damage in the model came from mortality, and I concluded that it was not up to date with the latest science.” at the end a “heat dome” located in the Pacific Northwest caused more than 100 deaths in Washington and Oregon. nearly 500 dead in British Columbia.

Bressler’s paper revises the social cost of carbon from being $ 37 per tonne to exceeding the White House’s current $ 51 value by $ 258 per tonne. This figure represents all the social damage caused by the emission of each tonne of carbon, such as agricultural losses, lost productivity caused by storms, damage caused by rising sea levels, and money spent on cleaning up climate-related floods. the cost of life lost due to excessive heat.

Many people die each summer due to lack of air conditioning or pre-existing conditions, so it has been difficult to try to determine the role that climate change has played in heat-related deaths. But now there is growing evidence that this calculation is being facilitated. In March, researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study in the journal Natural Climate Change he estimated that climate change is responsible for an average of 37% of all deaths associated with global warming. They reduced the numbers in 43 countries to calculate mortality loads associated with additional heat exposure caused by human-induced warming between 1991 and 2018.