The problems of climate change

Giancarlo Elia Valori

 Part two

As we continue to examine the studies on climate change that is raising the average temperature of the planet, it must be said that the impact of temperature on production efficiency at too low or too high temperatures negatively affects production efficiency and causes significant economic losses.

Outdoor workers are more severely threatened by high temperature heat waves due to prolonged exposure to excessively hot environments. When the high temperature (33°C) lasts for ten days, the risk of death from cardiovascular diseases in the outdoor worker group increases by 149%.

The 2020 China report by the prestigious journal ‘The Lancet’ calculated that in 2019 Chinese outdoor workers lost about 0.5% of their potential working hours due to high temperatures, thus causing a 1% loss of the country’s gross domestic product (126 billion dollars), which is equivalent to China’s total annual budget for science and technology.

Heat does not only affect physical health, but also mental health such as emotions, etc. In 2020 Patrick Baylis published an article in the Journal of Public Economics, one of the leading economic journals, to identify people’s latent preference for temperature. He used the public’s emotional expressions on Twitter from June 2014 to October 2016 as a source of information to construct daily, monthly and annual data on working days, holidays, and time trends specific to worker status. He noted people’s emotional response to temperature in the work environment. People’s emotions are generally negative in relation to normal temperature trends (20-25 °C), and people’s mood index drops from 0.1 to 0.2 or more on hot days (35-40 °C).

The influence of temperature also affects the sociability index.

Furthermore, Baylis used the exogenous impact of income (quarterly salary changes or parking fines, speeding fines, etc.) to economically measure this emotional response. He found that the economic value of a deviation for large differences in temperature affects the mutual willingness index between people. The willingness to invest money to reduce the maximum daily temperature from 30-35°C to 20-25°C is between 11.94 and 4.77 dollars (depending on salary or the amount of fines incurred).

It is worth noting that the accumulation of negative emotions will cause more social problems, such as depression, suicide, instigation of criminal activities and aggravation of human conflicts. In 2018 Marshall Burke, Felipe González, Patrick Baylis, Sam Heft-Neal, Ceren Baysan, Sanjay Basu and Solomon Hsiang edited a paper in “Nature Climate Change” that analysed the relationship between suicide rates and high temperatures. The results showed that for every 1°C increase in the average monthly temperature, suicide rates in US counties and in some cities in Mexico increased by 0.7% and 2.1%.

In 2013 Solomon M. Hsiang, Marshall Burke and Edward Miguel published a paper in “Science”, after reviewing the relevant literature, and found that extreme weather conditions can easily lead to individual and group violent crimes and property crimes, as well as political turmoil in poor countries and personal aggression and violence.

Such behaviours will increase with high temperatures. Moreover, the resulting extreme rainfall has widened the income gap by affecting agricultural production. The authors discussed the related mechanisms of change in the state of affairs, including climate change, which will alter the supply of resources, as well as exacerbate social inequality and cause human conflicts. This will also reduce socio-economic productivity, thus weakening the monitoring of government agencies and suppressing the control of crime intensity.

Population migration and fast urbanisation caused by climate change will lead to competition for very limited local resources. Climate change will affect people’s physiological mechanisms and reduce their ability to make rational judgements. People will become more abusive and confrontational, which in turn will lead to greater destabilisation.

The 2015 study by Matthew Ranson (2014) published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management also shows that a high-temperature climate will trigger more criminal activity and it is estimated that, between 2010 and 2099, the social costs of criminal activity in the United States due to climate change will reach between 29 and 78 billion dollars.

In summary, the impact of climate change on human health and socio-economic development cannot be underestimated. Consequently, climate change is a global challenge that defies national borders and urgently requires close cooperation among all countries. On December 12, 2015 at the Conference held in the French capital on climate change, the Paris Agreement was adopted, calling for global action against climate change.

It has become an important part of human history following the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Rio de Janeiro 1992) and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. It is the third milestone in international case law to address climate change, planning a new path for global climate research.

The main objective is to keep the global average temperature increase in this century within 2°C and bring the global temperature increase within 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.

The People’s Republic of China, a responsible developing country, has always attached great importance to tackling climate change. On September 3, 2016, China formally adhered to the Paris Agreement and became the twenty-third country to complete ratification. In September 2020, President Xi Jinping solemnly declared at the General Debate of the 75th General Assembly of the United Nations that the People’s Republic of China will enhance its efforts to collaborate on climate improvement, strive to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 (Green Development, regarded as indispensable to building a green civilization, as indicated by the decarbonization targets), as well as “actively respond to climate change” as early as the 14th Five-Year Plan 2021-2025.

According to the 2019 Annual Report on China’s Climate Change Policies and Actions, published by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment led by Huang Runqiu, China’s carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) decreased by 4% in 2018, with a 45.8% cumulative decrease since 2005, which is equivalent to a reduction of 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Furthermore, non-fossil energy accounted for 14.3% of total energy consumption, thus substantially reversing the fast growth in carbon dioxide emissions, and made an important contribution to the response to global climate change.

However, more effective policies and measures are still needed to ensure the fulfilment of the 2060 commitment and to minimise the health burden of climate change on the world’s population.