Climate change to stifle developing nations’ growth

Global warming will not only devastate agriculture in developing countries, it will undermine economic and political stability to a far greater extent than previously imagined, according to new study.

The link between “high temperatures and poor growth is much stronger than we’d realised”, says Benjamin Olken, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Crucially, says Olken, his team’s study is the first to link climate change with economic growth – as opposed to output – which will have a bigger long-term effect on a country’s fortunes.


…The team looked at how temperatures affected economic growth in the past 50 years. While rich economies seemed resilient to temperature rises, the GDP of poor countries dropped by 1 per cent in years when those temperatures rose 1