Economic growth goes down when the number of wet days and days with extreme rainfall go up. PIK researchers found that statistically 10 more wet days in a year reduce economic growth of a region by 1%. Rich countries are most severely affected, especially the manufacturing and service sectors. The data analysis of more than 1.500 regions over the past 40 years shows a clear connection and suggests that a rising number of daily rainfall extremes, caused by human-made climate change, will harm the global economy.

Day-to-day variations in temperature, i.e. short-term variability, has a substantial impact on macroeconomic growth, according to an article by Maximilian Kotz et al, published in Nature Climate Change. If this variability increases by one degree Celsius, economic growth is reduced on average by 5 percentage-points. Particularly affected are economies in low-income regions of the global South, where seasonal temperature differences can be as small as 3°C and farmers and small business owners have not yet cultivated resilience against temperature variability. This is in contrast to Economies in Canada or Russia, where average monthly temperature varies by more than 40°C within a year and economic actors seem better prepared to cope with daily temperature fluctuations than in low-latitude regions

Over the past century, global greenhouse gas emissions have led to a sharp increase in the number of bat species in the southern Chinese Yunnan province. Bats in this area have been suggested as the original carriers of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Scientists from Cambridge, Potsdam and Hawaii showed in a study that climate change caused shifts in the natural vegetation of the region, which allowed c. 40 bat species, carrying around 100 coronaviruses, to expand into newly suitable habitat. This process would have likely created new opportunities for viruses to be transmitted or evolve, potentially facilitating the eventual spill-over to humans. In this way, climate change may have played an important role in the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.