Economic accountability of climate sustainability[Comptabilité économique de la soutenabilité climatique]

Respecting the Paris Agreements commitments, which derive from the Paris Agreements on climate, requires the commitment of significant financial resources, which are evaluated here using a macroeconomic model combining a criterion of intergenerational distribution of the climate effort and assumptions on the effectiveness of decarbonisation technologies. They show that for France, the current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory is unsustainable, in the sense that in order to reach the carbon neutrality commitment in 2050, the annual level of climate spending would have to increase very substantially, to 4.5% of GDP from the current 1.9%. TIn relation to annual emissions, these evaluations make it possible to deduce a social price of carbon or a value for climate action, which has been increased significantly compared to previous evaluations, in the wake of the results of the Quinet committee in 2019. Such evaluations of the emissions trajectory and the social carbon price could be the entry point for environmental economic accounting that includes the degradation of natural assets caused by economic activities.