Climate change will make you poorer, according to a new report

Even if you believe you haven’t yet been directly impacted by climate change, your wallet will feel its effects soon, according to a new study.

Record-breaking heat waves, severe floods and acute wildfires, exacerbated by climate change, carry a colossal price tag: an approximately 19% reduction in global income over just the next 26 years, a new study published Wednesday found. That financial gut punch won’t just affect big governments and corporations. According to the United Nations, the world is heading toward a gain of nearly 3 degrees of global warming in the next century, even with current climate policies and goals – and researchers say individuals could bear the economic burden. The researchers in Wednesday’s study, published in Nature, said financial pain in the short-term is inevitable, even if governments ramp up their efforts to tackle the crisis now. “These impacts are unavoidable in the sense that they are indistinguishable across different future emission scenarios until 2049,” two of the study’s researchers from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, Maximilian Kotz and Leonie Wenz, told CNN via email. However, they say immediate actions to reduce climate change could stem some losses in the longer term. Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor and environmental researcher at Stanford University, said the economic damage from climate change will take different shapes. Not only can extreme weather events result in costly repairs to damaged property, but elevated temperatures can also impact agriculture, labor productivity, and even cognitive ability in some cases.