Researchers have created a scientific basis for calculating how much a country's carbon emissions have hurt the economy of other nations. The novelty was disclosed in a study published on Tuesday (12), in an ad estimated as a "potential watershed" for climate disputes.

Research by Dartmouth College, based in the United States, found that a small group of large polluters – including Brazil – caused trillions of dollars in economic losses due to warming emissions, with warmer and poorer territories as the hardest hit targets, Euronews Green reports.

The United States and China, the world's two leading emitters, caused global revenue losses of more than US$1.8 trillion each from 1990 to 2014, while Russia, India and Brazil caused losses of more than US$500 billion each in the same period – largely, especially in the case of Brazil,  due to deforestation.

The analysis, Reuters explains, allows additional details to show the damage caused by a single emitter to the economy of another individual country among the sample of 143 countries for which data are available.

"This research provides legally valuable estimates of the financial damage that individual nations have suffered due to the climate change activities of other countries," Justin Mankin, senior researcher at the study, said in a statement.

The analysis identified 2 million possible values for each interaction between countries and used a supercomputer to process a total of 11 trillion values to quantify and address cause-and-effect uncertainties. Warmer temperatures can cause economic losses for a country through various channels, such as reducing agricultural yields or reducing labor productivity through thermal stress.

On the other hand, for some colder countries in the north, warming can increase production by increasing crop yields. Thus, while U.S. territorial emissions cost Mexico a total of $79.5 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) losses between 1990-2014, according to the analysis, its impact on Canada was a $247.2 billion gain. The amounts used are values in U.S. dollars adjusted to inflation for 2010.

"The assertion that it is possible and scientifically credible to link an individual actor to an individual tangible impact is a statement that has not been made robustly in previous works," the study's lead author, Christopher Callahan, said in a statement.

In the last two decades, the number of climate-related lawsuits has increased from just a few to more than 1,000. But these have largely targeted major oil companies and other companies, rather than trying to define the responsibility of certain countries.

Source: Um só Planeta