Economic disparity among generations under the Paris Agreement

Haozhe Yang and Sangwon Suh ()
Additional contact information
Haozhe Yang: University of California
Sangwon Suh: University of California

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract The costs and benefits of climate change mitigation are known to be distributed unevenly across time and space, while their intergenerational distribution across nations has not been evaluated. Here, we analyze the lifetime costs and benefits of climate change mitigation by age cohorts across countries under the Paris Agreement. Our results show that the age cohorts born prior to 1960 generally experience a net reduction in lifetime gross domestic product per capita. Age cohorts born after 1990 will gain net benefits from climate change mitigation in most lower income countries. However, no age cohorts enjoy net benefits regardless of the birth year in many higher income countries. Furthermore, the cost-benefit disparity among old and young age cohorts is expected to widen over time. Particularly, lower income countries are expected to have much larger cost-benefit disparity between the young and the old. Our findings highlight the challenges in building consensus for equitable climate policy among nations and generations.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25520-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-25520-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25520-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().