Economic impacts of climate change

The Climate Vulnerability Forum report estimates that climate change has reduced the wealth of 55 of the world’s most climate vulnerable nations by 20% over the last two decades. For South Africa, a high warming scenario is predicted to reduce GDP per capita growth by 13.5% and raise inflation by 2.1 percentage points by 2090. This places South Africa among the most severely impacted major economies globally. As I have argued previously with respect to South Africa, these estimates are much lower than the cumulative impact of existing factors weighing on South Africa’s growth such as electricity load-shedding and are dwarfed by the actual decline in our GDP per capita over the last decade (and over the much longer term).