Rapid swings in Uzbekistan’s reported economic output sent a landmark climate–economics model off course, inflating its projection of future global losses, researchers say.
Shannon Osaka reports for The Washington Post.
In short:
- A Nature commentary from Stanford’s Global Policy Laboratory traced a high-profile 2024 study’s dire GDP forecasts to wildly erroneous figures for Uzbekistan, where the dataset showed a 90% collapse in 2000 and a 90% rebound a decade later.
- Removing that single country slashed the study’s estimated climate-driven hit to world GDP from 62% to 23% by 2100, and from 19% to 6% by 2050.
- The original authors, based at Germany’s Potsdam Institute, say their conclusions survive after reprocessing the data and tweaking their model; Nature is now reviewing the paper.
Key quote:
“Everybody who works with data has some responsibility to look at the data and make sure it’s fit for purpose.”
— Solomon Hsiang, director of Stanford’s Global Policy Laboratory
Why this matters:
Governments, banks and insurers rely on integrated assessment models to set carbon prices, steer trillions in infrastructure spending, and judge whether coastal cities or farm belts will stay solvent. Climate economics already wrestles with uncertainties about how warming interacts with labor productivity, crop yields, and conflict; injecting bad data magnifies blind spots and arms political actors eager to dismiss the science outright.
Learn more: Global economic losses from climate change may be far worse than predicted, new study warns
