Scaling Potential Macroeconomic Impacts of Climate Effects of Siberian
Wildfires: Insights from MIROC-SPRINTARS AOGCM Experiments
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.