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Scaling Potential Macroeconomic Impacts of Climate Effects of Siberian Wildfires: Insights from MIROC-SPRINTARS AOGCM Experiments
  • Daiju Narita,
  • Teppei Yasunari,
  • Toshihiko Takemura
Daiju Narita
University of Tokyo

Corresponding Author:daiju.narita@global.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

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Teppei Yasunari
Hokkaido University
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Toshihiko Takemura
Kyushu University
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Abstract

A broad range of attempts have been made to quantify the macroeconomic impacts of climate change, such as those of intensifying weather extremes and of yield losses of major crops, which have been synthesized by the efforts to estimate the Social Cost of Carbon (e.g., the US Interagency Working Group, 2016). However, up to the present, few insights have been fed into these debates as to the economic impacts associated with climatic responses of aerosol emissions from wildfires. In this study, we shed light on the potential scale of macroeconomic impacts of Siberian wildfires’ climatic effects by drawing on results of sensitivity experiments on enhanced biomass burning (BB) emissions over the defined Siberian domain using a global aerosol climate model, MIROC-SPRINTARS, in which the model was coupled with the ocean model (i.e., Atmosphere-Ocean coupled Global Climate Model: AOGCM) – the scientific results of these simulations are also discussed in detail by our companion paper, Yasunari and Takemura (2019), in the same session at this AGU Fall Meeting 2019. We used sets of simulation results differing in the conditions of BB emissions and climate, in which three different reference levels of BB emissions over the defined Siberian domain were used under the present (RCP scenario in 2005) or future climate (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 in 2030) conditions. Differentials of annual average temperatures estimated by the simulations were used to compute monetary-equivalent economic impacts attributable to climatic effects of BB by applying the functions of the RICE-2010 model (the 2010 version of the regional integrated model of climate and the economy model: Nordhaus, PNAS, 2010), which is a regionally disaggregated version of the most widely used climate-economy model, the DICE model. The economic impacts were estimated for the most affected countries and regions by Siberian wildfires, such as Russia, China and Europe.