Abstract:
Focusing on global annual averages of climatic variables can bias aggregate and distributional estimates of the economic impacts of climate change. We here empirically identify dose-response functions of GDP growth rates to daily mean temperature levels and combine them with regional intra-annual climate projections of daily mean temperatures. We then disentangle, for various shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs), how much of the missing impacts are due to heterogeneous warming patterns over space. Global damages in 2050 are 25% (21-28% across SSPs) higher when accounting for the shift in the shape of the entire intra-annual distribution of daily mean temperatures at the regional scale.