Wildfire, flooding and a hit on GDP. Highlands Adapts report

It may not sound all that much to begin with. A reduction of –1.5% on gross domestic product (GDP) each year, due to the negative impacts of climate change in the Scottish Highlands, says a new report.  

This isn’t like the precipitous financial crash of 2008, or the slashing of GDP by the pandemic and its lockdowns, or even Brexit. It’s a fraction of what Covid slashed off Scotland’s GDP in 2020, when it dropped by 19 percent, to boomerang back up 17% later in the year.  

But it’s a loss that is predicted to stick around and rise, as the report, Climate Resilience: Economic Assessment of Climate Change Impacts, by Highland Adapts estimates, to –3.3% a year by the 2080s. It represents a persistent whittling away.

The figures have been arrived at through a review of other research, and the paper acknowledges that they depend “on the future level of warming” and that “some studies indicate potentially higher impacts than this under a worst-case scenario when catastrophic risks are included” 

As such they mirror some of those that have been calculated for other countries – the United States for instance, which according to Amir Jina, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, range between 1 and 4% annually. 

The figures vary, but most reports that have investigated the cost of climate change suggest at least some sort of impact on global or national GDP. One paper, published earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimated that under a 3C global temperature rise,  economic damage wrought by climate change to be six times worse than previously thought with wealth shrinking at a rate “comparable to the economic damage caused by fighting a war domestically and permanently”. It would cause “precipitous declines in output, capital and consumption that exceed 50% by 2100”.

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“Damages," it says, "resulting from increasing annual mean temperature are negative almost everywhere globally, and larger at lower latitudes in regions in which temperatures are already higher and economic vulnerability to temperature increases is greatest.”  

So, yes, that does include Scotland, and none of it sounds good – even for those who do not believe GDP, and growth, are the key metrics we should orient ourselves around. 

Another recent paper,  published in Nature, predicted that the costs of damage will be six times higher than the price of limiting global heating to 2°C .  We may imagine that in rainy, grey Scotland, following the "worst summer since 2015", we are somewhat protected, or that a warmer world would even bring some benefits, but the Highland Adapts report is a reminder that we are going to feel it.

We might see some small benefits, some possible reduced winter fuel payments, and we will likely not be seeing the kinds of heat-related death figures some countries are already being hit by, but some bad will come, and is already here. 

Flooded sports field at Kingussie (Image: PA)

Perhaps what feels most real, following the damage wrought by Storm Babet last year, is the news that impacts from flooding (coastal, river, and surface water) are estimated to “increase from around £11 million per year currently to £20 million per year by the middle of the century and double that by the end of the century”. 

Wildfires too are expected to cost us more.  The report, which  used “data from current wildfires, economic costs of wildfire suppression, and non-market impacts from the release of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants” estimates costs to be “approximately £0.3 billion/year, driven by the high societal cost of carbon emissions. This could increase fourfold by the mid-century.” 

This seems particularly pertinent given that only last week Nature published a paper which said that Canada’s record wildfires last year produced more carbon emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but three major countries. 

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The Highland Adapts report also paints a portrait of the multiple impacts on Scottish products. Risks to salmon production “from rising sea temperature and ocean acidification”; risks to whisky production from extreme events and climate conditions; costs to  forestry and timber sector due to high winds. Almost all of these can be seen in small glimpses already.  

Do these figures and this report have the kind of shock value that might propel us to push harder to Net Zero, or ramp up anti-flood measures? Published on the day that Scotland’s Finance Secretary, Shona Robinson confirmed a £500 million cut in public services, perhaps they may not have that drive.

But costs of £20 million per year from flooding, or threats to key export industries,  would seem significant if they happened today. And extend that Highlands estimate of a 1.5% reduction to the rest of Scotland, with a GDP of around £200 billion, and what we see is £3 billion lost in a year.   

This new Highland Adapts report is a reminder that we need to think ahead, and act with the urgency we might have if that future were already here. We need to hold on to two goals. One is climate mitigation; the other adaptation and the fostering of resilience.