Executive Summary

This summer, you have seen another year of climate change-related record-breaking extreme weather at the local, state, national, and international levels. These climate change-related consequences and record-breaking events have real costs far greater than most people realize.

Our central scenario cost estimate is that climate change imposed approximately $4.67 trillion in total U.S. social and economic costs and $18.7 trillion in worldwide social and economic costs during 2016–2025. To put those costs in perspective, the total GDP of the world's richest country, the United States, is $32.5 trillion a year, and the world's current GDP is estimated at $126 trillion.

These climate change cost totals are much larger than insured losses or physical-disaster tallies because they include many more direct and indirect costs that are normally not found in other climate change cost reports. They also include estimated premature mortality and illness, lost labor and business output, food and water disruption, displacement, and other costs that ordinary climate disaster accounting omits.

Under a continued-high-warming, insufficient-adaptation pathway, the model produces approximately $51.9 trillion of U.S. costs and $235.5 trillion of worldwide costs during 2026–2055. That means that over the next 30 years, about 2 years of US and global GDP will be spent exclusively on climate change consequence-related costs.

Please note: these are cumulative 30-year scenario totals, not a bill arriving in one year. The illustrative sensitivity cases are wide: roughly $31–$83 trillion for the United States and $141–$377 trillion worldwide.

Introduction

What we have tried to do is include all primary and secondary climate change consequences in a master cost estimate for the US and the world. We started by reviewing credible cost estimates of climate change impacts in the US and around the world over the last 10 years. We created this article because average citizens and normal businesses have no real idea of the trillions of dollars in past and future climate change consequence costs they may soon be asked to bear through significantly higher taxes and potentially drastically reduced social services and business subsidies. It is unlikely that most individuals, businesses, and governments have budgeted for all current climate change costs and, most likely, have not budgeted for future costs. This creates a potential future climate-change consequence cost and an economic potential disaster and nightmare that is, unfortunately, already unfolding worldwide.

Simple climate change denial will not stop the rising climate change consequence costs you see in the news headlines both nationally and internationally every day. Government, business, or individual climate change denial will also not stop the increasing climate change consequence-caused budget deficits in many families, businesses, and countries worldwide. 

We invite you to review the comprehensive climate change consequence cost charts and the listing of climate change consequences included in the calculations for the US and the world for the past 10 years and, going forward, for 30 years in five-year increments. As you scroll down the page, you will see sections that make all of our calculations transparent, so you know where our numbers come from and how we arrived at the climate change consequence cost numbers. Near the lower third of the page, we painfully describe how these climate change costs will directly affect you, as an individual, a business, or a nation.

Because insurance companies are rapidly canceling climate change-related policies or skyrocketing premiums worldwide, after reading this article, please contact your local, regional, and national politicians and political parties and ask them how they plan to budget to address and fully cover the rising climate-change-related costs while still providing basic social services and necessary business subsidies. Additionally, ask them what portion of US or global climate change consequence costs they are going to hold the $38 trillion a year global fossil fuel cartel responsible for paying, so common taxpayers are not left holding the bag and paying for the damages directly caused by the products of the global fossil fuel cartel?

Please send them this article about the growing climate change consequence cost danger to the US and world economy, because as they say, denial of reality only makes the pain worse and makes it last longer.

How this climate change consequence cost analysis was built

No single government agency, university, insurance company, or international organization calculates the complete cost of climate change. We therefore began with credible documented foundations. For the United States, these include NOAA’s historical billion-dollar-disaster work and Climate Central’s continuation of that dataset. For worldwide losses, they include international catastrophe research from Munich Re and Swiss Re. Climate Central’s figures already include insured and uninsured direct losses, business interruption, agricultural assets, public infrastructure, and wildfire suppression. We did not add those items again. We used a constant-2025-dollar convention for this analysis and treated more recently stated source values as research anchors rather than copying them directly into the scenario totals.

The published sources do not yield a complete climate-cost total by themselves. Job One therefore organized the missing and documented consequences into separate cost buckets, assigned expert-judgment central values informed by the cited research, and deducted known overlaps. The historical bucket values produce $4.67 trillion for the United States and $18.7 trillion worldwide. The annual tables distribute those totals according to documented disaster severity and broader cost trends; they are not independently observed annual climate-attribution accounts. The future tables extend the scenario by category under continued warming, growing exposure, higher replacement costs, and incomplete adaptation. The result is a transparent statement of the scenario’s arithmetic and assumptions, but it is not a source-by-source econometric estimate or an official forecast.

1. Documented foundation: We used NOAA/Climate Central billion-dollar-disaster data as the principal U.S. direct-loss reference and Munich Re and Swiss Re natural-catastrophe research as global physical-loss references.
2. Climate attribution: We excluded ordinary geophysical disasters such as earthquakes. Because no complete annual attribution account exists, climate-attribution judgments vary by hazard and are more confident for heat than for many storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires.
3. Missing-cost scenario additions: We assigned separately labeled estimates for Job One for health and mortality, wildfire smoke, labor productivity, agriculture, water, supply chains, displacement, ecosystem services, and institutional costs, using the cited studies as research anchors rather than claiming that the studies directly produce our totals.
4. Overlap control: Insurance claims and the insurance protection gap were treated as ways losses are financed or distributed—not as additional physical damage. Rebuilding was not added when it was already included in direct damage. Food-price transfers were separated from the destruction of production. Property devaluation, lost tax revenue, financing costs, and ecosystem losses were included only as scenario estimates to exclude damage already accounted for elsewhere.
5. Projection: The next-30-year tables scale the separate buckets under a continued-high-warming, growing-exposure, insufficient-adaptation scenario. The aggregate five-year totals imply average real annual growth of about 6.6% for U.S. costs and 6.8% for worldwide costs across the projection horizon. These rates are Job One scenario assumptions; they are not tied to a named SSP/RCP pathway or probability distribution.
6.  The climate change consequence list used: We reviewed and included cost calculations for almost every one of the 80-plus primary and secondary climate change consequences found in Job One for Humanity’s 2026 Climate Change Consequences Forecast and Primary and Secondary Climate Change Consequences. If you have any doubts about why the total climate change consequence costs are so high, please read over the Primary and Secondary Climate Change Consequences list, which we have accounted for in this article, and you will quickly see that when ALL of the costs are accounted for our totals and range cost variations are reasonable, well-grounded, and rational.

 

Chart 1: Illustrative annual U.S. climate-change costs, 2016–2025

Job One scenario allocations in billions of constant 2025 U.S. dollars. These annual values allocate the $4.67 trillion historical bucket total based on documented disaster severity and broader cost trends. They are not independently observed annual climate-attribution totals. The relative index compares each year with 2025, which is set to 100.

Chart 2: Illustrative annual worldwide climate-change costs, 2016–2025

Job One scenario allocations in trillions of constant 2025 U.S. dollars. These annual values distribute the $18.7 trillion historical bucket total. They include scenario allowances for losses in low-income nations that are poorly insured or incompletely recorded and are not independently observed annual climate-attribution totals.

U.S. calculation: what makes up the $4.67 trillion?

The arithmetic below is fully additive, but the individual bucket values are Job One scenario judgments rather than outputs independently published by the listed sources. They are rounded to the nearest $10 billion. The “research anchor” label means that cited research helped bound or inform a category; it does not mean the cited source calculated the displayed bucket total.

Worldwide calculation: what makes up the $18.7 trillion?

All bucket values in this table are rounded Job One scenario estimates informed by the cited research. Munich Re, Swiss Re, the ILO, the IPCC, and other sources do not publish this $18.7 trillion total or the individual values below.

Accounting view: five different kinds of cost

The headline totals combine several legitimate but economically different measures. The regrouping below makes those differences visible. It does not add any new costs; it simply reorganizes the historical buckets above. Values are scenario estimates, and the placement of mixed categories is approximate.

How to reproduce the displayed arithmetic

.

30-year U.S. projection in five-year increments

Each number is the undiscounted total during that five-year period, in trillions of constant 2025 U.S. dollars. This illustrative pathway assumes continued high warming, increasing exposure, incomplete adaptation, no global economic collapse, and no full tipping-point catastrophe. The lower sensitivity case is 60% of the central value; the upper sensitivity case is 160%. These percentages test the effect of broad uncertainty; they are not statistically derived confidence bounds.

30-year worldwide projection in five-year increments

These are illustrative Job One scenario estimates, not values published by the catastrophe databases or a named SSP/RCP model. The $235.5 trillion total is the undiscounted sum of the six five-year periods in constant 2025 U.S. dollars. The progression from $15.0 trillion in 2026–2030 to $78.0 trillion in 2051–2055 implies average real annual growth of about 6.8% across the projection horizon.

Crosswalk: where every major consequence is counted

This crosswalk is designed to reduce omissions and show where overlap controls are needed. It cannot prove that every residual overlap has been eliminated.

The unbudgeted climate bill: who will actually pay?

Some climate-related expenses are already included in federal, state, and local budgets, but they are often scattered across disaster relief, firefighting, flood and crop insurance, public health, infrastructure repair, emergency housing, military base protection, and many other accounts. This can hide their combined scale. Many governments do not consolidate and fully fund the larger stream of expected future climate liabilities described in this analysis. Projected destruction, repeated rebuilding, declining tax bases, higher borrowing costs, health damage, lost productivity, relocation, and long-term infrastructure adaptation may remain underfunded fiscal exposures or contingent liabilities. A cost omitted from a budget does not disappear; it is delayed, shifted, reduced through prevention, or ultimately borne by someone else.

At the local level, the transfer can be especially punishing. A flood, fire, heat emergency, water shortage, or insurance retreat can reduce property values and business activity just when a city or county must spend more on emergency response, roads, water systems, public health, shelters, and rebuilding. This creates a double blow: public needs rise while property-tax, sales-tax, and business-tax revenues weaken. Without adequate reserves and outside assistance, communities may have to delay maintenance, reduce staffing, raise fees and taxes, or cut libraries, parks, transit, schools, health programs, police and fire services, and support for vulnerable residents. Repeatedly damaged communities could face severe service reductions, municipal debt stress, or both.

At the state and regional levels, costs can shift toward wildfire suppression, disaster aid, insurance backstops, electric grid and water system upgrades, transportation repairs, health care, agricultural assistance, and relocation programs. Balanced-budget requirements in many states make the danger more immediate: unlike the federal government, states often cannot simply borrow their way through a large operating shortfall. Unless climate reserves and adaptation investments grow rapidly, emergency climate spending can compete directly with education, Medicaid, housing, pensions, universities, transportation, and ordinary infrastructure maintenance. One state may also pass costs to other states when displaced residents relocate, supply chains shift, food and energy prices rise, or federal taxpayers finance recovery.

At the national level, the federal government often becomes the payer of last resort through disaster appropriations, flood and crop-insurance losses, health programs, infrastructure grants, military and security spending, and aid to overwhelmed states and communities. Federal borrowing can postpone an immediate tax increase, but it does not erase the fiscal burden. It shifts part of that burden to taxpayers nationwide and to future budgets through higher public debt and debt-service costs. As climate claims expand, a larger share of federal revenue could be committed to recovering from yesterday’s disasters and preparing for tomorrow’s, leaving less fiscal room for Social Security, Medicare, research, housing, education, poverty reduction, defense, and other national priorities. If these liabilities remain underbudgeted, the likelihood of service cuts, higher taxes or fees, increased borrowing, or some combination thereof substantially increases.

Individuals will experience this transfer even if their own home is never struck by a major disaster. They will pay more for insurance, electricity, water, food, transportation, rent, mortgage, medical care, and taxes, while receiving fewer or lower-quality public services. People in high-risk areas may lose insurance, home value, access to credit, or the ability to sell and move. Workers can lose hours, jobs, retirement savings, and health; renters can be displaced by the costs of rebuilding; and families may have to absorb relatives who can no longer live safely or affordably where they were. Lower- and middle-income households will suffer most because necessities take a larger share of their income and they have fewer savings with which to retrofit, relocate, or survive an uninsured loss.

Businesses will face both direct destruction and a rising layer of indirect costs: larger insurance premiums and deductibles, insurance withdrawal, higher interest rates, unreliable power and transportation, worker heat exposure, supply shortages, delayed production, damaged inventories, and weaker customer demand. Large companies may relocate or spread risk across regions, but many small and locally rooted businesses cannot. Some will pass costs to customers; some will reduce wages, jobs, investment, or benefits; and some will close. Rebuilding can temporarily increase measured economic activity, but replacing a destroyed warehouse, home, bridge, or power line is not new prosperity—it is money diverted from productive investment merely to restore what society already had.

The result can be a compounding national squeeze. Households pay more and may receive less. Businesses face higher costs and greater uncertainty. Local governments can lose tax capacity while demands rise. States may cut or postpone other priorities. The federal government may assume more losses and debt. Because each level can shift part of its burden to another, climate costs spread far beyond the place where a disaster occurs. Failing to place realistic climate liabilities in current budgets makes future suffering more likely: it delays prevention, hides the coming trade-offs, and substantially increases the likelihood that money will be taken abruptly from other essential services when climate-related bills arrive.

 

The same budget transfer monster but now magnified worldwide

Worldwide, the same transfer occurs, but poorer countries and communities have much less ability to absorb it. Many lower-income nations contributed least to accumulated greenhouse-gas pollution, yet they have weaker infrastructure, limited insurance, smaller emergency reserves, more outdoor labor, and less ability to borrow at affordable rates. Climate losses that a wealthy country can temporarily finance may force a poorer country to cut food assistance, schools, health care, clean-water projects, infrastructure, or economic development. Recovery loans then add debt service to future budgets, shifting today’s disaster costs onto future citizens while reducing the funds available to build resilience before the next disaster.

Regional climate shocks also cross borders. Crop failures increase international food prices; damaged ports and factories disrupt supply chains; drought and hydropower losses raise energy costs; disease and smoke spread; and displacement places new demands on receiving cities and countries. Businesses transmit these costs through higher prices, reduced investment, lower wages, layoffs, and shortages. Insurers and lenders may retreat from entire regions, leaving households, businesses, and governments to carry risks that were previously pooled across financial markets.

International aid and development institutions will face greater demands at the same time donor nations are spending more on their own disasters. If promised assistance does not keep pace, the burden will be transferred downward to the people least able to pay through hunger, untreated illness, lost schooling, informal debt, forced migration, and permanent loss of homes and livelihoods. Climate change can then intensify inequality, political distrust, instability, authoritarian responses, and conflict, producing still more humanitarian, security, and rebuilding costs.

The worldwide financial risk is therefore not a single enormous invoice arriving on a single date. It is a tightening system of recurring transfers: from insurers to policyholders and governments; from governments to taxpayers and future borrowers; from damaged regions to receiving regions; from businesses to workers and customers; and from public recovery budgets to every service that receives less funding. Unless these future liabilities are openly included in long-range budgets—and reduced through rapid mitigation, adaptation, resilient infrastructure, fair financing, and adequate reserves—climate change will progressively consume the resources societies need for health, education, development, poverty reduction, and preparation for the next crisis.

Limitations and reasons these numbers may change

• Attribution: The climate share of an event differs by hazard, region, and metric. Climate change can alter probability or intensity without being the sole cause.
• Data gaps: Small events, informal work, uninsured losses, chronic disease, ecosystem degradation, and losses in poorer countries are underreported.
• Valuing life and nature: Economic valuation is ethically and technically contested. A dollar estimate is not a claim that a life, species, or culture can be replaced with money.
• Double counting: Cascades overlap. This model applies deductions, but some residual overlap or omission is unavoidable.
• Different accounting measures: Physical losses, lost output, financial effects, mortality valuations, and ecosystem valuations are not interchangeable. The accounting-view table separates them, but the headline total combines them as different forms of social harm.
• Scenario construction: The future tables are not tied to a named SSP/RCP pathway, integrated assessment model, or probability distribution. Their implied growth rates are Job One scenario assumptions, and the 60% and 160% cases are sensitivity tests rather than confidence intervals.
• Future policy: Strong mitigation and adaptation could lower future damage. Delayed action, faster warming, conflict, or tipping cascades could raise it sharply.
• Not included in the central case: A pandemic assigned to climate change, major AMOC disruption, ice-sheet collapse beyond mainstream mid-century ranges, climate-triggered seismic or volcanic catastrophes, nuclear war, or full regional/systemic collapse.

 

Important climate change consequence cost methodology disclosure 

Except for specifically quoted source figures, every historical bucket total, annual table value, and 2026–2055 projection on this page is a Job One for Humanity expert-judgment scenario estimate informed by published research. The cited databases provide partial foundations; they do not independently produce the $4.67 trillion, $18.7 trillion, $51.9 trillion, or $235.5 trillion totals. These totals depend on Job One’s assumptions about climate attribution, many omitted climate change consequence costs, overlap deductions, exposure, adaptation, and future growth.

This analysis combines direct physical destruction, lost economic production, financial and fiscal effects, monetary valuations of premature mortality and illness, and ecosystem-service losses. All are important forms of social harm, but they affect households, businesses, governments, and the wider economy in different ways. Not every dollar in the headline total becomes government spending, a tax, or a cash bill. The 30-year amounts are undiscounted cumulative sums expressed in constant 2025 U.S. dollars. They are not official forecasts, audited national accounts, present-value estimates, or statistically derived confidence intervals. The lower and upper figures are illustrative sensitivity cases calculated at 60% and 160% of the central scenario.

Glossary

Attribution science

Research estimating how human-caused climate change altered the likelihood or severity of a particular type of event.

Central scenario estimate

The model’s selected middle case—not a claim of exact precision or statistical probability.

Constant 2025 dollars

Amounts adjusted to the purchasing power of U.S. dollars in 2025, removing ordinary inflation.

Contingent liability

A possible future financial obligation that depends on whether a particular event occurs.

Direct loss

Immediate physical destruction of property, crops, vehicles, or infrastructure.

Discounting

Converting future costs into a smaller present value to reflect timing and a chosen discount rate. The future totals on this page are not discounted.

Indirect loss

A secondary economic effect, such as lost production, health damage, transport delay, or a supply shortage.

Economic loss

The full measured monetary loss, whether insured or uninsured.

Ecosystem services

Benefits nature provides, including pollination, water purification, soil fertility, carbon storage, fisheries habitat, and coastal storm protection.

Exposure

People, buildings, infrastructure, and economic activity located where a hazard can affect them.

Insurance protection gap

The difference between total economic losses and the portion paid by insurance.

Managed retreat

Planned relocation of people and assets away from places that are becoming too dangerous or costly to protect.

PM2.5

Airborne particles 2.5 micrometers wide or smaller. They can penetrate deeply into lungs and enter the bloodstream.

Reinsurance

Insurance purchased by insurance companies to help cover unusually large or concentrated losses.

Scenario

A conditional description of what could occur under specified assumptions; it is not a certainty.

Sensitivity case

A recalculation using a different broad assumption to show how much the result could change. It is not the same as a statistical confidence interval.

Social and economic cost

A broad measure that can include market losses, nonmarket harms, health effects, and damage to natural systems. It is not identical to government spending or lost GDP.

Stranded asset

Property or infrastructure that loses economic usefulness or value before the end of its expected life.

Value of a statistical life

A standard policy-analysis method for valuing small changes in mortality risk across a population. It is not a price placed on any named person.

Wet-bulb heat

A measure combining temperature and humidity that indicates how effectively sweating can cool the human body.

Frequently asked questions

Are these official government totals?

No. The direct-disaster foundations include government and insurance-industry data, but the expanded totals are illustrative Job One for Humanity expert-judgment scenario estimates informed by multiple credible sources.

Is $235.5 trillion an official or statistically probable forecast?

No. It is the undiscounted total produced by Job One’s continued-high-warming, increasing-exposure, insufficient-adaptation scenario. The cited sources do not independently publish that number, and the sensitivity cases are not confidence intervals.

Why are these totals larger than NOAA or insurance-company figures?

Those databases mainly measure direct physical losses or insured claims. They generally omit much of the mortality, illness, smoke exposure, lost work, food insecurity, ecosystem damage, migration, financial stress, and small-disaster burden included here.

Did you count insurance claims on top of disaster damage?

No. An insurance payment transfers money to finance a loss; it does not create a second destroyed building. The insurance protection gap likewise shows who bears already-counted damage. Only distinct insurance-system costs—such as administration, transaction costs, and incremental capital costs—are included separately.

Does climate change cause every storm, fire, drought, or flood?

No. Climate change can make an event more likely or intense, expand the area exposed, or worsen background conditions. The model assigns only an attributable or amplifying share.

Why assign money to premature death or ecosystem loss?

Leaving them at zero would imply that they have no economic consequence. Policy analysis uses established valuation methods, but the moral and cultural value of life and nature is larger than any financial estimate.

Are higher food prices entirely an economic loss?

No. Some price increases transfer income from buyers to sellers. This model counts destroyed production, added real resource costs, malnutrition, and productivity effects—not the entire increase in consumer spending.

Does every dollar in the headline total become government spending?

No. The total includes physical damage, lost output, health and mortality valuations, financial effects, and ecosystem losses. Only some of those costs enter government budgets directly. Others are borne by households, businesses, workers, insurers, lenders, communities, or natural systems.

Could adaptation lower these totals?

Yes. Better building codes, flood protection, cooling, water efficiency, wildfire management, resilient grids, early warning, and well-planned relocation can substantially reduce losses. Adaptation cannot eliminate all damage, particularly under continued high emissions.

Could the projections be too low?

Yes. The central case excludes several catastrophic tail risks and major nonlinear cascades. It also assumes markets and governments continue functioning well enough to measure costs. Severe systemic breakdown can make ordinary dollar accounting meaningless.

Could the projections be too high?

Yes. Fast emissions reductions, strong adaptation, safer land-use choices, technological improvements, and lower exposure growth could move outcomes toward or below the low range.

What is the most important takeaway?

The familiar disaster headline is only the visible portion of the cost. Climate change steadily extracts money and capacity through health, work, food, water, infrastructure, insurance, finance, ecosystems, and displacement at the same time.

 

Bibliography and numerical foundations

These sources support documented anchors and provide context for the scenario assumptions. Except for specifically quoted source values, the expanded historical totals, annual allocations, and future tables are Job One expert-judgment scenario estimates; the sources do not independently produce those numbers.

1. 1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Centers for Environmental Information. U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. Historical direct-loss foundation through NOAA’s transition of the dataset to Climate Central in 2025.
   2. Climate Central. U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. Continuation of the NOAA series and current methodology. The database’s total direct costs already include insured and uninsured losses, business interruption, agricultural assets, infrastructure, and wildfire suppression. Its current online figures are CPI-adjusted to 2026 dollars; this article uses them only as research anchors within a constant-2025-dollar scenario convention.
   3. Munich Re. Natural disaster and NatCatSERVICE research. Global overall and insured natural-catastrophe loss data. Munich Re notes that some annual summaries exclude heatwaves and droughts.
   4. Swiss Re Institute (2026). Natural catastrophes in 2025: the persistent rise of wildfire and storm risk. Reports that global insured natural-catastrophe losses have risen about 5%–7% annually in real terms over the long run, driven mainly by exposure and rising costs; this is a sense-check, not a climate-attribution rate.
   5. U.S. Global Change Research Program. Fifth National Climate Assessment. U.S. climate impacts, risks, equity, sectors, and the finding that extreme events already cost the United States close to $150 billion annually in recent years.
   6. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2024). Climate Change Indicators in the United States, Fifth Edition. Observed heat, wildfire, sea-level, snowpack, ocean, and health trends.
   7. Law, B. E., et al. (2025). Anthropogenic climate change contributes to wildfire particulate matter and related mortality in the United States. Estimated approximately 15,000 climate-attributable wildfire-PM deaths and a $160 billion burden during 2006–2020.
   8. International Labour Organization (2019). Working on a Warmer Planet. Projects loss of 2.2% of global working hours and about $2.4 trillion in 2030 from heat stress. This is total projected heat-stress loss, not a calculation of the incremental share attributable to human-caused warming.
   9. Kotz, M., Kuik, F., Lis, E., and Nickel, C. (2024). Global warming and heat extremes to enhance inflationary pressures. Estimates average global annual food-inflation pressure of about 0.92–3.23 percentage points by 2035; the uncertainty spans emissions scenarios, climate models, and empirical specifications. Price changes are not automatically additional real resource losses.
   10. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022). Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Global evidence on climate damages, health, food, water, ecosystems, cities, infrastructure, and adaptation.
   11. United Nations Environment Programme (2025). Adaptation Gap Report 2025. Estimates developing-country adaptation finance needs of approximately $310–$365 billion annually by the mid-2030s.
   12. World Bank (2021). Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration—Overview. Projects up to 216 million internal climate migrants by 2050 in the pessimistic reference scenario across six modeled regions; the estimate does not cover most high-income countries.
   13. World Meteorological Organization (2023). Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water-Related Hazards, 1970–2021.
   14. World Weather Attribution. Rapid attribution analyses using peer-reviewed methods. Event-specific evidence on how warming changes heat, rainfall, drought, wildfire-weather, and storm risks. Not every rapid web analysis is itself a peer-reviewed journal article.
   15. Office of Management and Budget (2022). Climate Risk Exposure: An Assessment of the Federal Government’s Financial Risks to Climate Change. Federal revenue and expenditure risk pathways. OMB also distinguishes nonmarket damages, such as mortality and biodiversity loss, from direct effects on GDP, federal revenue, or federal spending.
   16. Dietz, S., Rising, J., Stoerk, T., and Wagner, G. (2021). Economic impacts of tipping points in the climate system, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Used to understand tail risks; tipping catastrophes are not separately added to the central scenario.