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Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TCs) can adversely affect economic development for more
than a decade. Yet, these long-term effects are not accounted for in current
estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC), a key metric informing climate
policy on the societal costs of greenhouse gas emissions. We here derive
temperature-dependent damage functions for 41 TC-affected countries to
quantify the country-level SCC induced by the persistent growth effects of
damaging TCs. We find that accounting for TC impacts substantially increases
the global SCC by more than 20%; median global SCC increases from US$ 173
to US$ 212 per tonne of CO2 under a middle-of-the-road future emission and
socioeconomic development scenario. This increase is mainly driven by the
strongly TC-affected major greenhouse gas emitting countries India, USA,
China, Taiwan, and Japan. This suggests that the benefits of climate policies
could currently be substantially underestimated. Adequately accounting for
the damages of extreme weather events in policy evaluation may therefore
help to prevent a critical lack of climate action.