That’s according to a study published in the June 30 edition of the journal Science that forecasts the economic damage of climate change on a county-by-county basis. Overall, researchers found, the parts of the country that are already the hottest and have the greatest economic disparities will likely suffer the most.
“In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit,” Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers Univesity-New Brunswick and one of the study’s co-authors, said in a release.
The Gulf Coast’s “exposure to sea-level rise ― made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes ― poses a major risk to its communities,” Kopp said. “Increasingly extreme heat will drive up violent crime, slow down workers, amp up air conditioning costs, and threaten people’s lives.”
As a result, economic opportunities would shift northward and westward from the South and the Midwest, stimulating economies along the Rocky Mountains and in the northern border states:
But while those historically cooler regions would benefit from things like higher agricultural yields and lower energy costs, the overall American economy is expected to suffer.
For each 1 degree Fahrenheit that temperatures rise, the team of economists and climate scientists say, we should expect the U.S. gross domestic product to drop by about 0.7 percent.
“Unmitigated climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United States,” said lead researcher Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we continue on the current path, our analysis indicates it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”
Read more at In the U.S., the South Will Pay the Most for Climate Change, Study Finds
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