Counting

consequences, such as people forced to relocate due to rising sea levels, or becoming migrants due to longer and more widespread droughts in some regions, as well as positive consequences, such as the increased use of climateneutral energy sources lead to new economic activities — something the Oxford Economics paper does not clearly address. Therefore, calculating the economic cost of climate change effects requires the estimation of a net economic impact — subtracting what is lost and adding what may be recovered through alternative forms of productivity.

All of this leads to a greater level of uncertainty as the scope of the economic forecast becomes broader. There are simply too many variables: Climate change consequences vary from region to region; vary in scale, intensity and

rate of change; and are ameliorated (or aggravated) by varying human responses to them. Given enough time and data, a reasonably com

out and develop a global indicator, which is the implicit suggestion of the Oxford Economics approach, and the report even provides spe

GDP for every 1.0 degree Celsius increase in global mean surface temperature over the preindustrial average, or between 2.5 percent and 7.5 percent of global GDP for a temperature rise of 4.0 degrees

metanalysis of the most detailed studies to date on the question.

Again, those are measures of global impacts, derived by so much averaging that for any specific jurisdiction, they are most likely practically meaningless. Providing an actionable measure, however, is not the point of the Oxford Economics study. The point is to highlight that climate change does have measurable economic effects, and that these effects are occurring,

to accept, accustomed as it is to putting the best face on any judgment of the Philippine economy, regardless of the rationality of it. Adding a little realism to economic planning, however, will provide for more effective, and possibly even beneficial responses, than hand-wringing when results do not match hopeful estimates.