Revalidation of temperature changes on economic impacts: a meta-analysis

To identify appropriate strategies for temperature change adaptation, the economic impacts of temperature changes are critical to be understood. Despite a wide investigation about this issue, the obtained evidence is still mixed, including positive linear, negative linear, U-shaped, inverted U-shaped, or even irrelevant relationships. To address this question, we investigated the findings of collected studies through a meta-analysis based on 87 studies with 2977 estimates. We first examined the genuine effects between temperature changes and economic impacts based on statistical models (i.e., funnel plots, MST and FAT-PET-PEESE tests). Then, we adopted the meta-regression method to identify the sensitive modeling characteristics influencing the research outcomes. The results illustrate four major conclusions. First, there is a negative relationship between temperature changes and economic outputs in linear regression analysis, and an inverted U-shaped relationship in quadratic regression specifications. Second, research areas and temperature variables involved in individual studies have significant effects on current economic consequence analysis. Particularly, rich countries located in colder climates can even benefit from temperature changes, whereas poor countries located in hotter climates suffered adverse impacts. Third, the resilience factors should be involved in future prediction models to investigate the mitigation effects. Fourth, the sensitive modeling specifications were different according to different research sub-objects. The results obtained can provide implications for the sustainable development of the economy and human society caused by climatic change, and can also make contributions to advance the theory and practice of future temperature change consequence analysis.