Huge thanks to an amazing team of brilliant coauthors: Aburto, Brander, Cheung, Emmerling, Free, Granella, Tavoni, Verschuur, and, of course, Kate Ricke, who believed in this project.

@scrippsocean.bsky.social

Most of these damages come from non-market values: nutrition, coastal protection, and the existence value of marine ecosystems — not just market losses.

Our central estimate is $48 per ton of CO₂ (2020 USD) — which roughly doubles the SCC of the model without ocean damages. But here is a fuller comparison using other discount rates and baseline damage functions.

We integrate ocean science + economics into a country-explicit IAM (RICE50+) to estimate the blue SCC — the welfare impacts of climate change on corals, mangroves, fisheries & mariculture, and ports.

Figures looked weird, so sharing again!

Press Release here: scripps.ucsd.edu/news/ocean-w...

By 2100, foregone benefits = 28B USD/year.
But uneven:

Asia 64% of losses

Middle East and Africa 18%

LatAm & Caribbean 12%

OECD 3%

Climate damages ecosystems broadly, but people don’t bear losses equally.

Together:
🌍 Socioeconomics push toward recovery.
🔥 Warming oceans stall or reverse progress.

Without climate change, mangroves could recover to global restoration targets. With warming, we lose ~150,000 ha by 2100.

Temperature matters too.

Warming helps colder sites expand. But beyond a threshold, heat damages dominate.

We identified sea surface temp of the hottest month (SSTh) as the strongest signal.

This Figure shows the marginal effect of both drivers

We find a Kuznets-like pattern: at low GDP, mangroves are often lost (deforestation/land-use change). Beyond a development threshold, protection strengthens and mangrove cover recovers. Socioeconomic growth can support conservation—but only after that threshold is crossed.

Mangroves protect coasts, store carbon & sustain fisheries. Using global data (1996–2020), we mapped mangrove extent & tracked how it responds to climate & socioeconomic drivers. Each point = 1° grid cell with mangroves.