by SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science WriterFILE - Shoppers buy food in a supermarket in London, on Aug. 17, 2022. ound. ound.
And that translates to an increase in overall inflation of 0.8 to 0.9 percentage points by 2035, just caused by climate change extreme weather, the study said.Those numbers may look small, but to banks like the U.S. Federal Reserve that fight inflation, they are significant, said study lead author Max Kotz, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany
And by 2060, the climate-triggered part of inflation should grow, with global food prices predicted to increase 2.2 to 4.3 percentage points annually, the study said. That translates to a 1.1 to 2.2 percentage point increase in overall inflation.Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University's business school who wasn't part of the research, said what he calls “climateflation” is “all too real and the numbers are rather striking.
Usually when economists talk inflation and climate change, it's about rising energy prices in response to efforts to curb warming, but that's only part of the problem, Kotz said.“There are these productivity shocks that we know about from climate change, from the weather phenomena caused by climate change, from heat waves and so forth to reduce agricultural productivity,” Kotz said. “Those also then have a knock-on effect on food inflation, on headline inflation.