Climate Change Poses Major Threat to Manufacturing, Study Finds

Will President Trump take it seriously now?

Surging temperatures and risings seas already threaten to upend industries from real estate to agriculture to insurance, leaving coastal properties swamped, outdoor workers overheated, and policies vulnerable to catastrophic new risks.

Add manufacturing to that list.

One extra day of temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit costs the average Chinese manufacturing plant roughly $10,000 in 2017 dollars in lost output, according to research released last month.  The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, tracked temperatures and daily churn at half a million Chinese plants from 1998 to 2007.

In 2050 those losses are on pace to balloon to more than $47.2 billion in 2017 dollars as the world’s biggest manufacturing country loses 12 percent of its factory output each year.  That equates to about 4 percent of annual gross domestic product in a country where 32 percent of GDP comes from manufacturing.

In one particularly striking result, the researchers found that high-tech manufacturers ― those producing medical supplies, aerospace equipment, and computer parts ― are just as sensitive to extreme temperature as low-tech sectors, such as apparel and textiles.

“China is the de-facto factory for the world,” Kyle Meng, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of environmental economics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote in an email to HuffPost.  “Losses in the Chinese manufacturing sector can have ripple effects on consumer prices around the world, including the U.S.”

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