Journal
CLIMATIC CHANGE
Volume 160, Issue 2, Pages 251-269Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10584-020-02661-1
Keywords
Heat stress; Climate change; Labour productivity shocks; International trade; Computable general equilibrium; Germany
Funding
- German Federal Environment Agency [FKZ 3716 48 102 0]
- Austrian Climate and Energy Fund under its 10th call of the Austrian Climate Research Programme, project COIN-INT [B6770197]
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We investigate climate change impacts transferred via foreign trade to Germany, a country that is heavily engaged in international trade. Specifically, we look at temperature changes and the associated labour productivity losses at a global scale until 2050. We assess the effects on Germany's imports and exports by means of a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. To address uncertainty, we account for three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP1, SSP2 and SSP3) and two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) using projections from five global climate models. We find that average annual labour productivity for high intensity work declines by up to 31% for RCP4.5 (and up to 38% for RCP8.5) in Southeast Asia and the Middle East by 2050, all relative to a 2050 baseline without climate change. As a consequence, for RCP8.5, Germany's imports from regions outside Europe are lower by up to 2.46%, while imports from within Europe partly compensate this reduction. Also, Germany's exports to regions outside Europe are lower, but total exports increase by up to 0.16% due to higher exports to EU regions. Germany's GDP and welfare, however, are negatively affected with a loss of up to - 0.41% and - 0.46%, respectively. The results highlight that overall positive trade effects for Germany constitute a comparative improvement rather than an absolute gain with climate change.
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