Page:OMB Climate Change Fiscal Risk Report 2016.pdf/6

 will place further strain on Federal fire suppression resources. Climate change shocks and stressors worldwide pose global security risks and affect resource needs for defense operations and infrastructure. Wide-ranging impacts will impede economic production and diminish Federal revenue.

Although the presence of risk across these and other exposure points is clear, we remain in the early stages of quantifying the total likely burden for American taxpayers. In several critical areas, quantitative projections of specific climate impacts are not yet available. The projections we do have are useful in approximating the order of magnitude of potential impacts of climate change on the Federal Budget, but are still subject to significant limitations and uncertainty. As a result, because of these limitations and because other impacts are not considered in this assessment, the total costs of climate change for the Federal Government may be greatly underestimated, and other costs affecting the American people are not considered here. Despite these limitations, the accumulated evidence suggests the fiscal impacts of further unmitigated climate change could leave a significant imprint on the Federal Budget over the course of this century.

On the expenditures side of the Federal ledger, each of the five program-specific assessments conducted for this report unambiguously illustrates that climate change will raise expenditures. The table below shows estimates of recurring, annual expenditures due to climate change across four of the five program areas—totaling $34-$112 billion per year by late-century, the equivalent of $9-$28 billion per year in today’s economy.