May 19. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The economic consequences of the climatic phenomenon known as El Niño can persist for several years and cost trillions in lost revenue worldwide,
As they emphasize in the magazine ‘science’ Dartmouth College researchers, in the years when it occurs, the band of warm ocean water that stretches from South America to Asia, known as El Niño, triggers far-reaching climate changes that cause devastating floods, droughts that destroy crops , plummeting fish populations, and an uptick in tropical diseases.
With El Niño expected to return this year, the researchers report that the economic cost of this recurring weather pattern can persist for several years after the event itself, costing trillions in lost income around the world. The study is one of the first to assess the long-term costs of El Niño and predicts losses much higher than those estimated by previous research..
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the natural cycle of warm and cold temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean that includes its cooler counterpart, La Niña. El Niño events alter weather patterns around the world and, in the United States, often result in wetter and warmer winters on the West Coast and to a milder hurricane season on the Atlantic coast.
The researchers spent two years examining global economic activity in the decades after the El Niño episodes of 1982-83 and 1997-98, finding a “persistent signature” of slowing economic growth more than five years later.
The world economy bled $4.1 and $5.7 trillion, respectively, in the half decade after each of these events, most of it by the poorer nations of the tropics.
Researchers project global economic losses in the 21st century to reach $84 trillion as climate change potentially amplifies the frequency and strength of El Niños, even if current commitments by world leaders to reduce emissions are met. carbon. They calculate that only the El Niño phenomenon forecast for 2023 could slow down the world economy by up to 3 trillion dollars between now and 2029.
Lead author Christopher Callahan, a doctoral candidate in geography at Dartmouth University, says the study addresses an ongoing debate about how quickly societies recover from major weather events like El Niño.
“We can say with certainty that societies and economies do not recover on their own,” he says. it’s a statement Callahan, adding that their data suggest that a post-El Niño recession can last up to 14 years, if not longer.
“In the tropics and in places affected by El Niño, there is a persistent phenomenon during which growth is delayed by at least five years –Explain–. The full price of these events has never been fully quantified: you have to add up all depressed growth in the future, not just when the event occurs.”
Lead author Justin Mankin, an assistant professor of geography, said the results highlight a critical and understudied factor determining the economic cost of global warming: year-on-year variations in climate conditions.
Although these oscillations are largely independent of global warming, they can amplify or diminish its effects. Described in his day as the “trunk of the climate variability tree”, El Niño is the largest and most important source of annual climate variation, which alters the weather around the world and affects national economies.
When it comes to climate change, world leaders and public opinion rightly focus on the relentless rise in global average temperature, Mankin says. “But if you calculate the costs of global warming without taking El Niño into account, then the costs of global warming are being drastically underestimated“, he stresses.
“Our well-being is affected by our global economy, and our global economy is tied to climate,” Mankin recalls. “When you wonder how costly climate change is, you can start by wondering how costly climate variation is. Here we demonstrate that such variation, embodied in El Niño, is incredibly costly and stagnates growth for years, leading us to cost estimates that are orders of magnitude higher than previous ones.”
Callahan and Mankin found that the events of 1982-83 and 1997-98 caused the US gross domestic product to be about 3% lower in 1988 and 2003 than it otherwise would have been. But the GDP of tropical coastal nations like Peru and Indonesia was lower by more than 10% that same year.
“The global pattern of the effect of El Niño on the climate and prosperity of different countries reflects the unequal distribution of wealth and climate risk – not to mention the responsibility of climate change – around the world,” he explains. El Niño amplifies the broader inequalities of climate change, disproportionately affecting the least resilient and prepared among us“.
As he points out, “the duration and magnitude of the financial repercussions that we have discovered suggest to me that we are maladapted to the climate that we have. Our accounting drastically raises the estimate of the cost of doing nothing. We need to both mitigate climate change and invest more in the prediction and adaptation to El Niño, because these phenomena will only amplify the future costs of global warming“he warns.
According to Callahan, the 2023 El Niño is projected to occur at a time when sea surface temperatures are at their highest. The last major El Niño event occurred in 2016, making that year the hottest on record.
Global warming has only intensified in the seven years since. Furthermore, the world is emerging from a prolonged La Niña and the two phases may be mutually reinforcing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts that the chances of El Niño settling in at the end of the summer are over 80%.
“Everything is set for a major El Niño event,” Callahan said. “Our results suggest that a major economic shock is likely to depress economic growth in tropical countries for a decade. The result could be trillions of dollars in lost global productivity compared to a world without El Niño.”
