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The state-of-the-art British-sponsored fast-track assessment of the global impacts of climatechange, a major input to the much-heralded
Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
, indicatesthat through the year 2100, the contribution of climate change to human health and environ-mental threats will generally be overshadowed by factors not related to climate change. Hence, cli-mate change is unlikely to be the world’s mostimportant environmental problem of the 21stcentury. Analysis using both the Stern Review and thefast-track assessment reveals that notwithstand-ing climate change, for the foreseeable future,human and environmental well-being will behighest under the “richest-but-warmest” sce-nario and lower for the poorer (lower-carbon)scenarios. The
developing 
world’s future well-being should exceed present levels by several-foldunder each scenario, even exceeding present well-being in today’s
developed
world under all but thepoorest scenario. Accordingly, equity-based argu-ments, which hold that present generationsshould divert scarce resources from today’surgent problems to solve potential problems of tomorrow’s wealthier generations, are unpersua-sive.Halting climate change would reduce cumu-lative mortality from various climate-sensitivethreats, namely, hunger, malaria, and coastalflooding, by 4–10 percent in 2085, while increas-ing populations at risk from water stress andpossibly worsening matters for biodiversity. Butaccording to cost information from the UNMillennium Program and the IPCC, measuresfocused specifically on reducing vulnerability tothese threats would reduce cumulative mortality from these risks by 50–75 percent at a fraction of the cost of reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs).Simultaneously, such measures would reducemajor hurdles to the developing world’s sustain-able economic development, the lack of which iswhy it is most vulnerable to climate change.The world can best combat climate changeand advance well-being, particularly of theworld’s most vulnerable populations, by reducingpresent-day vulnerabilities to climate-sensitiveproblems that could be exacerbated by climatechange rather than through overly aggressiveGHG reductions.
What to Do about Climate Change
by Indur M. Goklany 
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
 Indur Goklany is the author of 
The Improving State of the World
 , from which much of this paper is derived,and
The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisalof Environmental Risk Assessment
 , both pub-lished by the Cato Institute.
Executive Summary 
No. 609February 5, 2008
� 
 
Introduction
Most future scenarios suggest that theworld will get more populated and wealthierduring this century. Although this shouldadvance human well-being, it may alsoincrease climate change, which might in turnat least partly offset, if not overwhelm, any advances in well-being that would haveoccurred absent climate change. The U.N.Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changereports in its 2001 assessment that modestglobal warming (1 to 2°C over 1990 levels)could increase global economic product withgains in the higher-latitude, developed coun-tries, more than offsetting losses in develop-ing countries.
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However, global temperatureincreases beyond that could reduce globaleconomic product and wreak substantialenvironmental damage.Such considerations have led influentialpoliticians such as former British prime min-ister Tony Blair, former U.S. president BillClinton, and former French President JacquesChirac, to proclaim that climate change is themost important environmental problem fac-ing the globe this century and, unless checkeddrastically, would before long reduce humanand environmental well-being.
2
This study examines whether climatechange is in fact the world’s most pressingenvironmental and human health problemand considers the merits of mitigation (thatis, policies that would restrict emissions orconcentrations of greenhouse gases) versusadaptation (policies that would reduce ortake advantage of the impact of the climatechange caused by greenhouse gas emissions)to address whatever problems are created orexacerbated. In short, careful analysis revealsthat through the foreseeable future, climatechange exacerbates existing environmentaland human health problems, but only to a modest degree relative to contributions fromother factors not related to climate change.Hence, the threats posed by climate changeare more robustly and cost-effectively addressed, at least in the short- to medium-term, by policies that address the underlyingcauses of the environmental and humanhealth problems that are exacerbated by cli-mate change.The data and projections used in thisstudy come primarily from two reports:
The “fast-track assessment” (FTA) of theglobal impacts of climate change, spon-sored by the U.K. Department of Environ-ment, Forests and Rural Affairs; and
•
The Stern Review on the economics of climate change.
The Fast-Track Assessment
The FTA of the global impacts of climatechange was published in a special issue of 
Global Environmental Change: Part A
edited by Martin Parry.
3
This is supplemented, as nec-essary, by other DEFRA-sponsored studies.Many, if not most, authors of these papershave served as coordinating lead authors,lead authors, or contributing authors of theIPCC’s third and fourth assessment reports.Parry is, moreover, the current chairman of the IPCC’s Work Group II, which overseesthe impacts, adaptation and vulnerability sections of the assessments.Like all estimates of the impacts of climatechange, the FTA’s analyses are plagued withuncertainties resulting from the fact that suchestimates are derived using a series of linkedmodels with the uncertain output of eachmodel serving as the input for the next model.To compound matters, each model is neces-sarily a simplified representation of reality.The chain of models typically starts withemission models, which are driven by varioussocioeconomic assumptions about the next100 years or more in order to generate emis-sion scenarios extending to the latter part of this century. But even users of these emissionscenarios acknowledge that 2085 is at theouter limit of the foreseeable future becausesocioeconomic predictions beyond thatpoint are too speculative.
4
Even 2085 is likely too great a stretch. For instance, a paper com-missioned for the Stern Review noted that“changes in socioeconomic systems cannot
2
Climate changeexacerbatesexisting environ-mental andhuman healthproblems, butonly to a modestdegree relative toother factors.
 
be projected semi-realistically for more than5–10 years at a time.”
5
Emission scenarios are used to drive modelsto estimate future trends in atmosphericgreenhouse gas concentrations. Those concen-trations are then used to model the amount of heating (or “radiative forcing” ) of the climatesystem which is next fed into coupled atmos-phere-ocean general circulation models to esti-mate spatial and temporal changes in climatic variables, which are in turn used as inputs tosimplified and often inadequate biophysicalmodels that project location-specific biophysi-cal changes pertaining to the resources that areaffected by climate change (e.g., vegetation andother species, crop, or timber yields).The finer the spatial scale of the analysis,the greater the uncertainties in climatic vari-ables. But because the resources that are affect-ed by climate change are spatially heteroge-neous—as are the socioeconomic conditionsthat affect those resources and determinewhether and how human beings will respondto changes—it is more appropriate to do thebiophysical impacts analysis at the local scalethan at larger regional or national scales.Finally, depending on the human or nat-ural system under consideration, the outputsof these biophysical models may have to befed into additional models to calculate thesocial, economic, and environmental impactson those systems, including the calculationof regional and global scale impacts throughthe use of trade models.In addition to the cascading uncertaintiesthat propagate from model to model—thecumulative effects of which have yet to bequantified—the results of these impactassessments are subject to potentially largesystematic errors which tend to substantially overstate negative impacts while simultane-ously understating positive impacts of cli-mate change. Those systematic errors are dueto the fact that the assessments generally donot account fully, if at all, for the increases inadaptive capacity resulting from
•
increases in wealth postulated under thesocioeconomic assumptions used togenerate emissions scenarios; and
•
the creation of new or improved tech-nologies that would come on line overtime, because technology accrues overtime.
6
In other words, the impact assessmentsare inconsistent with the assumptions builtinto the emissions scenarios used to drive cli-mate change.Despite these shortcomings, for the pur-poses of this study I will, for the most part,take the results of the FTA at face valuebecause it has figured prominently in theinternational debate on global warming andbecause it allows us to develop estimates of the relative contribution of climate change to various climate-sensitive problems in thefuture.
7
Like the FTA, this paper does notconsider low-probability but potentially high-consequence outcomes such as a shut-down of the thermohaline circulation or themelting of the Greenland and Antarctic icesheets. They are deemed unlikely to occurduring this century if they occur at all.
8
Stern Review 
The Stern Review on the Economics of ClimateChange
was commissioned from NicholasStern, the erstwhile chief economist of theWorld Bank, by the then-chancellor of theexchequer, Gordon Brown, on behalf of theBritish government. It was released on October30, 2006. The Stern Review estimated thatunmitigated climate change will reduce welfareby an amount equivalent to a reduction in con-sumption per capita of 5–20 percent “now andforever” if one accounts for market and non-market impacts and the risk of catastrophe.
9
Italso suggested that by the year 2200, the 95thpercentile of the equivalent per capita GDPlosses could rise to 35.2 percent.
10
Several researchers have disputed the SternReview’s impact estimates and consider themgreatly overblown.
11
The review’s authorsthemselves emphasize “strongly” that thenumbers should not “be taken too literally.”
12
I will, nevertheless, put aside these concernsand accept the Review’s findings in order to
3
The resultsof impact assess-ments are subjectto potentially large systematicerrors which tendto substantially overstate negativeimpacts.
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