EVIDENCE TO THE HOUSE OF LORDS SELECT COMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC AFFAIRS ON ASPECTS OF THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

摘要

1. Dependence of damage estimates upon assumptions of economic growth and technological development; 2. Are scenario storylines internally consistent in light of historical experience? 3. Merits of reallocating expenditures from mitigation to international development; 4. Ancillary benefits associated with greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. Greater economic growth could, by increasing emissions, lead to greater damages from climate change. On the other hand, by increasing wealth and advancing technological development and human capital, economic growth would also increase a society's adaptive capacity and reduce those damages. Although analyses of the impacts (or damages) of climate change generally incorporate economic growth into the emissions and climate change scenarios that they use as inputs, these analyses do not adequately account for the increase in adaptive capacity resulting from that very growth. Because of this inconsistency, these analyses generally tend to overstate impacts.