{"id":18423,"date":"2026-04-14T16:47:14","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T20:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionswill.com\/?p=18423"},"modified":"2026-04-14T16:51:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T20:51:58","slug":"the-social-cost-of-ghg-emissions-and-climate-liability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionswill.com\/en\/the-social-cost-of-ghg-emissions-and-climate-liability\/","title":{"rendered":"THE SOCIAL COST OF GHG EMISSIONS AND CLIMATE LIABILITY"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For several decades, international climate negotiations and legal proceedings regarding climate liability have been hampered by a fundamental shortcoming: the lack of a quantitative framework for linking specific emissions to localized and monetized economic damages. While significant progress has been made in attributing anthropogenic forcing to national or corporate emitters, the translation of these emissions into quantified economic damages has, until now, been largely absent from the scientific literature.<\/p>\n

It is precisely this gap that Burke et al. (2026)i<\/sup><\/span><\/a>\u00a0address. In an article published in the journal Nature<\/em> on March 25, the authors propose an integrated framework for calculating Loss and Damage (L&D)<\/strong>, aligned with the Social Cost of Carbon (SC-CO\u2082) methodology, and apply this framework to individual, corporate, and national emitters.<\/p>\n

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A method for understanding the economic impact of CO\u2082<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

The method used by the researchers treats each ton of CO\u2082 emitted as a financial asset that generates a negative value stream\u2014much like a landfill whose nuisances persist for decades if left untreated and impact the entire community, even though the vast majority of individuals have not disposed of anything there.<\/p>\n

This method consists of four steps :\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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  1. We start with the emissions inventories of each country, company, or individual (Global Carbon Budget 2022 and Carbon Disclosure Project).<\/li>\n
  2. A climate model (FaIR v.2) calculates the global temperature increase caused by these emissions.<\/li>\n
  3. Regional models translate this global warming into local temperature changes, country by country.<\/li>\n
  4. Finally, a robust statistical relationship, built on 60 years of historical data, links these temperature increases to losses in per capita GDP growth for each country.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This last point is important: the researchers show that heat does not only harm crops or health. It permanently slows GDP growth<\/strong>, particularly in South-South countries\u2014and this effect persists for years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    <\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

    Application of the Analytical Framework<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

    The authors apply their analysis at different scales. For example, an annual round-trip long-haul flight (8,000 km) over ten years would generate approximately $25,000 in discounted future damages by 2100, compared to only $165 in historical damages\u2014a ratio of about 150 to 1. Or, at the corporate level, Saudi Aramco\u2019s emissions between 1988 and 2015 have caused approximately $3 trillion in cumulative global damages through 2020, while anticipated future damages are more than twenty times higher ($64 trillion by 2100).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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    Le march\u00e9 carbone<\/strong>, qu\u2019il soit volontaire ou r\u00e9glement\u00e9, est un outil cl\u00e9 dans la lutte contre les changements climatiques. Le projet de loi C-59 apporte des innovations qui renforcent ce m\u00e9canisme essentiel.<\/p>\n

    Rappel du fonctionnement du march\u00e9 carbone<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

    Le march\u00e9 carbone repose sur un principe simple : donner une valeur \u00e9conomique aux r\u00e9ductions d'\u00e9missions de GES et encourager l'action sur les \u00e9missions r\u00e9siduelles<\/strong><\/span><\/a> via l\u2019achat de cr\u00e9dits carbone. Ce m\u00e9canisme peut \u00eatre :<\/p>\n