Assessing climate change costs in Europe

COACCH is funded within the Horizon2020-framework of the European Union and is implemented with 12 partners from European Research Institutions, Universities and Ministries.

The aim of the project is to advance the evidence base on complex climate change impact chains, assessing their market, non-market, macroeconomic and social consequences in the EU. It will integrate different modelling and statistical approaches to cover a wide array of sectors from agriculture, energy, infrastructure to health and ecosystems. Special attention will be turned to competitiveness and growth, as well as to the social and economic repercussions of global climate change in Europe.

COACCH will deliver new knowledge on the impacts and economic consequences of those climate tipping points that are of major concern for Europe, and explore the new concept of climate-induced socio-economic tipping points, at European and national level. COACCH will advance the research on economic valuation of climate action, identifying suitable short to long-term mitigation and adaptation policies under climate change, including extreme events and tipping points.

It will compare the performances of different mitigation and adaptation policies according to a set of criteria for decision making under uncertainty. The aim is to reduce uncertainty around the valuation. Finally, COACCH will use a wide range of innovative communication and dissemination activities, to promote easier access to the results and ensure the outreach and impact of the project, and contribute to major international scientific networks and reports such as the IPCC and the Climate- ADAPT platform.

Climate Analytics leads work related to impacts on industry, energy, services, and trade. In this task, the partners work on the estimation of climate change impacts on production and labour productivity of industry and services sectors, trade, tourism, and energy demand and supply at a higher EU spatial resolution (NUTS-2).

The applied econometric methods result in sub-sectoral, subnational estimates of economic responses to climate which give a more differentiated view on impacts within countries and between sectors. This helps to provide more detailed information relevant for policy development.

As a result of the co-development and co-designing process of COACCH, the methods respond to the key interests of stakeholders such as investigating further sector- and sub-national-specific adaptation patters as well as controlling for spill-overs between neighbouring sub-national regions. The results of the analysis of historical data is fed into a larger CGE model that incorporates other results from the consortium to arrive at an assessment of the overall macroeconomic impact.

Additionally, Climate Analytics is heading the analysis of distributional impacts of climate change for the EU through the use of household survey data. For this task, a range of possible development scenarios will be developed for the different household types using current and projected household structure and production functions. The projected functions will be drawn from climate scenarios and paired with grid-level climate change impacts as well as macroeconomic level risks analysed in prior tasks to provide estimates of the potential effects of climate change on households.