Climate Impacts

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Climate change impacts can be measured in nearly every facet of our lives and planet. The combined effects of climate change and climate variability are expected to result in a wide range of impacts for the region’s communities, economy, and natural systems. These include projected changes in water resources, forests, species and ecosystems, oceans and coasts, infrastructure, agriculture, and human health. These have an especially large and immediate impact on Indigenous peoples and way of life. 
 

Climate change impacts particularly susceptible to market impacts, that is impacts that are linked to market transactions and directly affect GDP. Monetary measures of non-market impacts, e.g., impacts on human health and ecosystems, are more difficult to calculate.
 

Other difficulties with impact estimates are listed below:

• Socioeconomic trends: Future predictions of development affect estimates of future climate change impacts, and in some instances, different estimates of development trends lead to a reversal from a predicted positive, to a predicted negative, impact (and vice versa)Knowledge gaps: Calculating distributional impacts requires detailed geographical knowledge, but these are a major source of uncertainty in climate models.

• Vulnerability: Compared with developed countries, there is a limited understanding of the potential market sector impacts of climate change in developing countries.

• Adaptation: The future level of adaptive capacity in human and natural systems to climate change will affect how society will be impacted by climate change. Assessments may under- or overestimate adaptive capacity, leading to under- or overestimates of positive or negative impacts.

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