Quantifying climate loss and damage consistent with a social cost of carbon

Climate change is causing measurable harm globally^1,2. Political and legal efforts seek to link these damages with specific emissions, including in discussions of loss and damage (L&D)^3,4; however, no quantitative definition of L&D exists^5,6, nor is there a framework to link past and future emissions from specific sources to monetized, location-specific damages. Here we develop such a framework, which is integrated with recent efforts to estimate the social cost of carbon⁷. Using empirical estimates of the non-linear relationship between temperature and aggregate economic output, we show that future damages from past emissions-one component of L&D-are at least an order of magnitude larger than historical damages from the same emissions. For instance, one tonne of CO₂ emitted in 1990 caused US$180 in discounted global damages by 2020 ($40-530) and will cause an additional $1,840 through 2100 ($500-5,700). Thus, settling debts for past damages will not settle debts for past emissions. In other illustrative estimates, a single long-haul flight per year over the past decade leads to about $25k ($6,000-77,000) in future damages by 2100, and US emissions since 1990 caused $500 billion ($180-1,300 billion) of damage in India and $330 billion ($110-820 billion) in Brazil. Carbon removal offers an alternative to transfer payments for settling L&D, but is increasingly ineffective in limiting damages as the delay between emission and recapture increases.