Country-level social cost of carbon

Katharine Ricke (), Laurent Drouet, Ken Caldeira and Massimo Tavoni
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Katharine Ricke: University of California San Diego
Ken Caldeira: Carnegie Institution for Science
Massimo Tavoni: RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE)

Nature Climate Change, 2018, vol. 8, issue 10, 895-900

Abstract: Abstract The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a commonly employed metric of the expected economic damages from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Although useful in an optimal policy context, a world-level approach obscures the heterogeneous geography of climate damage and vast differences in country-level contributions to the global SCC, as well as climate and socio-economic uncertainties, which are larger at the regional level. Here we estimate country-level contributions to the SCC using recent climate model projections, empirical climate-driven economic damage estimations and socio-economic projections. Central specifications show high global SCC values (median, US$417 per tonne of CO2 (tCO2); 66% confidence intervals, US$177–805 per tCO2) and a country-level SCC that is unequally distributed. However, the relative ranking of countries is robust to different specifications: countries that incur large fractions of the global cost consistently include India, China, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0282-y

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