Unraveling the Impact: Climate and Economic Data Analysis
Climate and economic data are crucial components in understanding the impact of environmental changes on global economic growth. In a recent study, researchers have utilized multiple observational and reanalysis datasets to construct ENSO timeseries and its global teleconnection. Monthly sea surface temperature data from Hadley Centre Sea Ice and Sea Surface Temperature dataset (HadISST) and land-based surface air temperature and precipitation data from ECMWF Reanalysis version 5 (ERA5) were used to analyze the period from 1950 to 2021. These variables were then interpolated to a horizontal grid of 1° × 1° and anomalies were constructed by removing monthly climatology and detrending to remove long-term greenhouse warming.
Country-specific annual economic data from the World Bank Development Indicators and Penn World Tables were used to analyze Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita for all countries from 1960 to 2019. Population density data from the Gridded Population of the World (GPW) version 4 was also incorporated to weigh country-specific economic data. Climate outputs from state-of-the-art climate models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) were used to project future changes in ENSO under greenhouse warming.
To estimate the economic production loss from future ENSO changes, projections from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways database version 2.0 were utilized. The study focused on constructing counterfactual scenarios with hypothetical future ENSO timeseries to assess the impact of ENSO on global economic growth. An empirical econometric model was applied to evaluate the nonlinear effect of ENSO on global economic production, taking into account various observed climate variables and control factors.
Statistical significance tests were conducted using Bootstrap methods to assess the historical response function and multi-model projections. The study also examined the heterogeneity of the ENSO effect across different groups of countries and assessed uncertainty in the projections. The results showed that climate models with varying ENSO amplitude changes contributed significantly to the total uncertainty in projected economic losses.
Overall, the research provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between climate and economic data, highlighting the importance of understanding the impact of environmental changes on global economic growth.