Warming means unfair share for poor
A bumper catch off the coast of northern Norway may be bad news for fishermen in southern waters. Image: Bo Eide via Flickr
LONDON, 5 March, 2016 – Climate change could seriously redistribute resources and reallocate wealth – but not in a fair way.
In a reverse of the famous Robin Hood folklore, it could rob from the poor to give to the rich, according to researchers. Yet even the rich may not feel any richer.
In one clear instance, as scientists have repeatedly warned, fish stocks are likely to move away from the equator and towards the poles, as the tropics heat up and expand.
This means that at least one valuable resource will move away from some of the world’s poorest nations, and in the direction of societies that are relatively wealthier − if only because economic power has for so long been vested in the temperate zones. And this shift will have economic consequences.
Eli Fenichel, assistant professor of bioeconomics and ecosystem management at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in the US, says: “People are mostly focused on the physical reallocation of these assets, but I don’t think we’ve really started thinking enough about how climate change can reallocate wealth and influence the prices of those assets. We think these price impacts can be really, really important.”
Real cash value
Only last month, Dr Fenichel identified a way of calculating a real cash value for what environmentalists call “natural capital”.
Now he and other colleagues, in a study for Nature Climate Change, have started to think about where and for whom the cash might start accumulating. He has no immediate answer.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
