Persistent effect of El Niño on global economic growth
Editor’s summary
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) affects weather globally and thus has many important socioeconomic impacts. How might possible changes to ENSO caused by anthropogenic climate change affect the economies of individual countries and the global economy? Callahan and Mankin show that El Niño persistently reduces economic growth and that national economies are sensitive to El Niño even when warming is taken into account. Future global economic growth could decline because of anthropogenic intensification of ENSO variability. —H. Jesse Smith
Abstract
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) shapes extreme weather globally, causing myriad socioeconomic impacts, but whether economies recover from ENSO events and how anthropogenic changes to ENSO will affect the global economy are unknown. Here we show that El Niño persistently reduces country-level economic growth; we attribute $4.1 trillion and $5.7 trillion in global income losses to the 1982–83 and 1997–98 El Niño events, respectively. In an emissions scenario consistent with current mitigation pledges, increased ENSO amplitude and teleconnections from warming are projected to cause $84 trillion in 21st-century economic losses, but these effects are shaped by stochastic variation in the sequence of El Niño and La Niña events. Our results highlight the sensitivity of the economy to climate variability independent of warming and the potential for future losses due to anthropogenic intensification of such variability.
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References and Notes
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Volume 380 | Issue 6649
9 June 2023
9 June 2023
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Received: 12 October 2022
Accepted: 2 May 2023
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dartmouth’s Research Computing and the Discovery Cluster for computing resources. We thank the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modeling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6.
Funding: This work was supported by National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship 1840344 to C.W.C. and grants from Dartmouth’s Neukom Computational Institute, the Wright Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities, and the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy to J.S.M.
Author contributions: Both authors designed the analysis. C.W.C. performed the analysis. Both authors interpreted the results and wrote the paper.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
Data and materials availability: All data and code that support this study are available at https://github.com/ccallahan45/CallahanMankin_ENSOEconomics/.
License information: Copyright © 2023 the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original US government works. https://www.science.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse
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National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship: 1840344
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References
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