Accounting for Biodiversity Loss Raises the Social Cost of CO2
In this working paper, the authors examine how climate change contributes to biodiversity loss and incorporate its nonuse value into the Social Cost of Carbon, emphasizing its role in guiding more comprehensive climate policies.
Abstract
Scientific evidence of the effects of climate change on biodiversity continues to accumulate. However, economic damages from biodiversity loss go unaddressed in recent updates of the social cost of carbon (SC-CO2), implicitly assigning biodiversity a zero-dollar value in federal climate policy analyses. Here we show that the value that society places solely on the existence of biodiversity, termed the nonuse value, contributes an additional $8 per tCO2 to the total. That contribution is on par with the contribution of global energy-use costs and exceeds the contribution of coastal infrastructure loss due to sea-level rise.
