Quantifying the economic loss from climate change in China is crucial for
understanding the potential costs and benefits of climate policy within the context of carbon
neutrality. This study develops a multidisciplinary and integrated assessment framework for
climate damage, which uses the Beijing Climate Center Simple Earth System Model (BCC-SESM)
to estimate climatic data under the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) scenarios with
the medium Shared Social-economic Pathway (SSP2) scenario in China. This paper estimates
climate damage in eight major sectors by a bottom-up approach, makes substantive revisions and
calibrations for the sectoral climate damage functions and parameters for China based on the
FUND model, and formulates the aggregate climate damage function. Results show that under the
Business-as-Usual RCP8.5 scenario, by 2050 human health damage accounts for the largest share
(61.92%) of the total climate loss, followed by sea-level rise damage (18.57%) and water resources
damage (5.84%). Climate damage in non-market sectors reaches 14.64 trillion CNY, which is a
4.8-fold increase over the climate damage of market sectors which is only 3.02 trillion CNY. The
total climate damage function for China is a quadratic function of temperature rise, with climate
damage of 5.36%, 5.67%, 5.74%, and 8.16% of the GDP by 2050 under RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0,
and RCP8.5 respectively, indicating that the marginal climate damage increases non-linearly with
temperature rise.
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