Abstract: Climate change raises important fairness issues linked to distributional impacts and the unequal resilience of territories, yet within-country inequality and climate change damages are not described in the Shared Socio-economic Pathways baseline database. This study extends the latter data set by integrating the joint distribution of income inequality and economic damages at a fine-grained sub-national level. The results show that global income inequality, which has been falling since the early 2000s, is projected to rise again in all SSP scenarios but the SSP1 Sustainability scenario, partly due to large economic damages affecting the poor in a disproportionate manner. Moreover, the Sustainability scenario, SSP1, records the strongest rates of economic and welfare growth net of economic damages, despite displaying lower baseline economic growth than the Fossil-fuel scenario, SSP5.Â
Author: Myrto KASIOUMI, Fabrice MURTIN, & Marc FLEURBAEY
Keywords: climate change; climate change impacts; economic damages; inequality; Shared Socioeconomic Pathways; SSP