Persistent effect of El Niño on global economic growth

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adf2983. This is version 3 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Christopher Callahan, Justin Mankin

Abstract

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, attributing $4.1T and $5.7T in global income losses to the 1982-83 and 1997-98 events, respectively. Increased ENSO amplitude and teleconnections from warming cause $84T in 21st-century economic losses in an emissions scenario consistent with current mitigation pledges, 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.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5NM1W

Subjects

Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

Dates

Published: 2022-12-01 18:04

Last Updated: 2023-05-18 18:58

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License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data Availability (Reason not available):
All data and code that support of this study will be made available upon publication at github.com/ccallahan45.