Future heat stress to reduce people's purchasing power

PLoS One. 2021 Jun 10;16(6):e0251210. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0251210. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

With increasing carbon emissions rising temperatures are likely to impact our economies and societies profoundly. In particular, it has been shown that heat stress can strongly reduce labor productivity. The resulting economic perturbations can propagate along the global supply network. Here we show, using numerical simulations, that output losses due to heat stress alone are expected to increase by about 24% within the next 20 years, if no additional adaptation measures are taken. The subsequent market response with rising prices and supply shortages strongly reduces the consumers' purchasing power in almost all countries including the US and Europe with particularly strong effects in India, Brazil, and Indonesia. As a consequence, the producing sectors in many regions temporarily benefit from higher selling prices while decreasing their production in quantity, whereas other countries suffer losses within their entire national economy. Our results stress that, even though climate shocks may stimulate economic activity in some regions and some sectors, their unpredictability exerts increasing pressure on people's livelihood.

MeSH terms

  • Climate Change
  • Heat Stress Disorders / economics
  • Heat Stress Disorders / prevention & control
  • Hot Temperature*
  • Humans
  • Models, Economic

Grants and funding

This research has received funding from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the research projects CLIC (FKZ: 01LA1817C) and SLICE (FKZ: 01LA1829A), the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union (grant agreement 820712), and from the Volkswagen foundation. The publication of this article was funded by the Open Access Fund of the Leibniz Association.