Infrastructure protectionCost of Arctic methane release could be “size of global economy”: experts
As the Arctic warms and sea ice melts at an unprecedented rate, hitting a record low last summer, the thawing of offshore “permafrost” in the region is releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Economic modeling shows that the possible methane emissions caused by shrinking sea ice from just one area of the Arctic, the East Siberian Sea, could come with a global price tag of $60 trillion — the size of the world economy in 2012.
Economic modeling shows that the possible methane emissions caused by shrinking sea ice from just one area of the Arctic could come with a global price tag of $60 trillion — the size of the world economy in 2012.
As the Arctic warms and sea ice melts at an unprecedented rate, hitting a record low last summer, the thawing of offshore “permafrost” — frozen soil — in the region is releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Scientists have previously warned that there are vast reservoirs of methane in the Arctic, hundreds of billions of tons of a gas many times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming — of which only a fraction needs releasing into the atmosphere to trigger possibly catastrophic climate change.
A University of Cambridge release reports that now, researchers from Cambridge and Rotterdam have for the first time calculated the potential economic impact of a scenario some scientists consider increasingly likely: that the methane below the East Siberian Sea will be emitted, either steadily over the next thirty years or in one giant “burp.”
Writing in the journal Nature, the academics say that just this area’s methane alone — some fifty billion tons, or fifty gigatons — would have a mean global impact of $60 trillion, an amount very similar to the size of the entire global economy last year. Current U.S. national debt stands at a mere $16 trillion in comparison.
The economic impact modeled was only for the methane existing on the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, and “the total price of Arctic change will be much higher,” they warn.
“Arctic science is a strategic asset for human economies because the region drives critical effects in our biophysical, political and economic systems,” write the academics, who say that world leaders will “miss the bigger picture” without factoring in Arctic methane projections — as neither the World Economic Forum or the International Monetary Fund currently recognize the economic danger of Arctic change.
The new results were achieved using PAGE09, the latest version of the PAGE integrated assessment model developed by Dr. Chris Hope from Cambridge Judge Business School. PAGE09 is currently used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and an earlier version was used for the U.K. government’s Stern Review in 2006 — the major report on climate change economics on which Hope was a specialist advisor.
For the latest research, Hope worked with Gail Whiteman, Professor of
