Global economic growth could plummet by 50% between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, according to a new report.
The stark warning from risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) hugely increases the estimate of risk to global economic wellbeing from climate change impacts such as fires, flooding, droughts, temperature rises and nature breakdown. In a report with scientists at the University of Exeter, published on Thursday, the IFoA, which uses maths and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, called for accelerated action by political leaders to tackle the climate crisis.
Their report was published after data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) showed climate breakdown drove the annual global temperature above the internationally agreed 1.5C target for the first time in 2024, supercharging extreme weather.
In case you are not aware of the World 3 model, now you are:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.13442
This is a modern update and recalibration of the MIT developed, Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” model, originally done in the 1960s.
Recalibration 23 is the most recent update of basically the same underlying model; in extremely simplified terms, they replaced the older, extremely difficult to quantize ‘pollution’ metric with CO2 levels.
Going by it, we are basically right now at the peak of world industrial output, world food production and world human population.
By 2075, the world will have about 3 billion less people, mainly from famine deaths.
by 2050, world industrial output will be back to where it was in about 1965.
Here’s the Human Welfare Index (HWI), basically an expanded Quality of Life kind of metric:
Firstly, note that the BAU and Recal23 models track the trend of actual HWI well, but are overestimates.
Even those overestimates have HWI dropping to roughly Great Depression / WW2 levels by 2050.