Part Three / How it Affects Us

3.17 Warming and Inequality

All online sources accessed on

  1. poor populations suffer … more than rich populations Carleton, T. A., and Hsiang, S. M., ‘Social and economic impacts of climate’, Science, 353 (6304), 2016, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aad9837; Hsiang, S. M., et al., ‘The distribution of environmental damages’, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 13 (1), 2019: 83–103, https://doi.org/10.1093/reep/rey024.

    Research suggests that there are two main reasons Carleton, T. A., et al., ‘Valuing the global mortality consequences of climate change accounting for adaptation costs and benefits’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022: Article qjac020, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjac020; Burke, M., et al., ‘Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production’, Nature, 527 (7577), 2015: 235–9, https://doi:10.1038/nature15725. See discussion of the evidence for the relative importance of these mechanisms in Hsiang et al., ‘The distribution of environmental damages’.

    the ‘ideal’ average temperature tends to be 13–20°C Carleton and Hsiang, ‘Social and economic impacts of climate’.