Distributional aspects of climate change impacts

Climate change is likely to impact more severely on the poorer people of the world, because they are more exposed to the weather, because they are closer to the biophysical and experience limits of climate, and because their adaptive capacity is lower. Estimates of aggregated impacts necessarily mak...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGlobal environmental change Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 259 - 272
Main Authors Tol, Richard S.J, Downing, Thomas E, Kuik, Onno J, Smith, Joel B
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Ltd 01.10.2004
Subjects
Adaptive capacity
Climate change
Distribution
Environment
Environmental change
Impacts
Poor
Scenarios
Vulnerability
Weather
Scenarios
Climate change
Impacts
Vulnerability
Adaptive capacity
Distribution
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Summary:Climate change is likely to impact more severely on the poorer people of the world, because they are more exposed to the weather, because they are closer to the biophysical and experience limits of climate, and because their adaptive capacity is lower. Estimates of aggregated impacts necessarily make assumptions on the relative importance of sectors, countries and periods; we propose to make these assumption explicit. We introduce a Gini coefficient for climate change impacts, which shows the distribution of impacts is very skewed in the near future and will deteriorate for more than a century before becoming more egalitarian. Vulnerability to climate change depends on more than per capita income alone, so that the geographical pattern of vulnerability is complex, and the relationship between vulnerability and development non-linear and non-monotonous.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
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ISSN:0959-3780
1872-9495
DOI:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2004.04.007