Dynamics and distribution of climate change impacts : insights for assessing mitigation pathways

Because climate change affects economies at different scales, quantifying its impacts is particularly challenging. Yet, understanding climate change impacts is key to design appropriate mitigation and adaptation response. Damage assessment allows to set global targets and regional policies against the cost of inaction, and to prepare for adaptation by highlighting future vulnerabilities and hotspots. This thesis analyse how the dynamics and distribution of climate change impacts affects the assessment of mitigation pathways. First, I show that climate system dynamics matters to evaluate the resulting economic impacts, which increases the present value of mitigation actions. Second, using different assessments of climate change impacts aggregated at the country level, I analyse the distributional effects of different emission pathways. Finally, I show how spillovers and structural change affect the distribution of impacts, through the example of heat stress on productivity