The world’s largest carbon emitters owe a huge debt to future generations. Some experts say that debt can be quantified financially.

That’s largely because the negative impacts of climate change won’t fall proportionally to responsibility. Some of the countries most likely to be hit dramatically by the adverse effects of climate change, such as small island nations facing the threat of completely losing their land to rising sea levels, have historic emission contributions that are dwarfed by those of top emitters like the United States.

In a new study, researchers at Stanford developed a quantitative framework to link individual emissions to actual damages that have happened and will happen around the globe. The framework is based on an estimate linking warming temperatures to the GDP of each country, offering a glimpse into the impact climate change is having on our world. The actual impact is likely much more significant since the data doesn’t account for areas that are “poorly captured in GDP data,” the researchers said, like climate-related health problems or the loss of one’s cultural homeland.

According to findings published in Nature on Wednesday, the United States has already caused $10 trillion in global damages from carbon emissions since 1990. Specifically, the researchers were able to link U.S. emissions since 1990 with $500 billion of damage in India, $330 billion in Brazil, and $1.39 trillion in the European Union. The United States’ carbon footprint also took a heavy toll on the nation itself. The researchers estimated that the U.S. has suffered a $16.2 trillion hit from all global carbon emissions since 1990, with $2.97 trillion of this damage stemming directly from American carbon emissions. (...)

Last month, the United Kingdom issued a warning that global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse could threaten the island nation’s national security, and indeed its very prosperity. According to a national security assessment commissioned by the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, or DEFRA, there is a high likelihood that “every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse,” a cascading effect that could have major implications for the nation’s food security.

But the 14-page report, entitled “Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security,” made headlines, not just for its alarming contents, but for its omissions.

The assessment, which The Times and The Guardian reported was put together with the help of the intelligence coalition that oversees spy agencies MI5 and MI6, was originally slated to be published in the fall of 2025, but was held by Downing Street for being “too negative.” It wasn’t until Green Alliance, an environmental think tank, filed a Freedom of Information request for the report that DEFRA posted the assessment to its website at all, although notably without the government pomp of a press release or public announcement.

The day after the landmark report hit DEFRA’s website, The Times reported it had seen an internal, unabridged version of the assessment that included warnings much graver than the public-facing report: overwhelming mass migration to Europe, increasingly polarized and populist politics in the UK, NATO conflicts over collapsing food production in Russia and Ukraine, and escalating tensions between China, India, and Pakistan that could potentially lead to nuclear war.

The UK media slammed its government for covering up the existence of the unabridged version, and for delaying the publication of the assessment in the first place. But the government responded to the public criticism with a shrug. “The assessment was developed through cross-government analytical and clearance processes, including consideration of how and when it should be published,” a DEFRA spokesperson told me over email. “It is being published now following the completion of those processes in line with the Government’s commitment to transparency and informed decision-making.”

Western governments have a track record of suppressing climate change intelligence assessments. Take the US spy community, for example. Despite decades of tracking and analyzing national security risks posed by climate change and making many of those intelligence products publicly available, the Office of the Director of Intelligence insists that it must keep a 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030” classified. Former intelligence officials have testified publicly about the report, cited the report in literature, and supported calls for the report’s declassification, to no avail. After almost two decades, the report remains classified to this day at the confidential level, the lowest level of national security secrecy.

More recently, in 2022, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese asked the nation’s most senior intelligence chief Andrew Shearer to personally lead a review of security threats posed by the climate crisis. Months later, Albanese refused to release the report or even say when it had been completed. Defense spokesperson for Australia’s Green Party David Shoebridge dubbed the Aussie government the “cult of secrecy in Canberra.” Since then, Albanese has continued to reject calls to make “even a saniti(z)ed version of the assessment public.” (...)