India’s country-level social cost of carbon emission was estimated to be the highest at $86 per tonne of CO2. It means the Indian economy will lose $86 by emitting each additional tonne of CO2. India is followed by the US, where the economic damages would be $48 per tonne of CO2 emission. Saudi Arabia is close behind at $47 per tonne of CO2 emission.
Each bubble represents one of 169 countries. The information related to a country is summarized in a tooltip window when you hover the bubble. The area of the bubble is scale to the median estimates of the country-level social cost of carbon (CSCC). The color of the bubble follows a 3 dimension palette to span the CSCC values and the 66.7% confidence interval size (see Uncertainty below). The Global view shows the aggregation of the bubbles in two groups positive and negative CSCC. The graph presents the cumulative CSCC against the the cumulative country population, to highlight the level of heterogeneity of the CSCC. The Map plots the bubbles according to their location in longitude and latitude.
Source: Country level social cost of carbon, Katharine Ricke, Laurent Drouet, Ken Caldeira
and Massimo Tavoni,
Nature Climate Change, Vol 8, October 2018
Did you know? Northern Europe, Canada and the Former Soviet Union have negative SCC values because their current temperatures are below the economic optimum.
Underestimating climate impacts
Carbon dioxide emissions are costing the Indian economy up to $210 billion every year. It is likely to suffer highest economic damage from climate change after the US. The country-level SCC for the India alone is estimated to be about $86 per tonne of CO2. For US, the cost is about $50 billion per tonne. This means that the nearly five billion metric tonnes of CO2 the US emits each year is costing the US economy about $250 billion.
The number the US uses to estimate the social cost of carbon is too low. When damages from sea level rise, extreme weather and other effects are taken into account, the global social cost of carbon is $180 to $800 per tonne, rather than the $12 to $62 range used by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Ahead of the Conference of Parties (COP 24) in Katowice, Poland in December, these country-level estimates create a reference for the world to better understand regional impacts, which are important for adaptation and compensation measures.