Climate change costs:

World tally up to $24 trillion.

As much as $24 trillion of the world’s financial assets could be hit by rising temperatures and extreme weather events, according to one of the first studies using an economic model to calculate the cost of climate change.

Fossil-fuel and other assets risk losing more of their market value from the impact of severe climate change than from tighter environmental regulation, according to the report by researchers from the London School of Economics, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The figures were derived from models that estimate the impact of climate change on gross domestic product growth and calculate the possible damage to companies’ assets.

“There’s no scenario in which financial assets are unaffected by climate change and climate change policies,” Simon Dietz, co-director of LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and lead author of the paper, said in an interview. “There will be winners and losers whatever the path.”

Some fossil-fuel assets could become marginalized and devalued by regulations that are designed to boost investment in renewable energy, research by the Carbon Tracker Initiative environmental group has previously shown.

About $2.5 trillion, or about half the current stock market value of fossil-fuel companies, is at risk if no further climate change action is taken, Dietz and his team found. The amount at risk could rise to about $24 trillion if climate change is worse than expected, according to the paper, which didn’t provide data on a country or regional level.

If action is taken to limit global warming to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the value of assets at risk would be much less, ranging from $1.7 trillion to $13.2 trillion, the study found.