Climate is undergoing a change of status in the global debate. Long confined to scientific alert or diplomatic negotiation, it is now entering the realm of economic accounting.
On March 25, 2026, a study published in Nature by a team at Stanford University gave this shift unprecedented scope by quantifying, for the first time at this scale, the economic damages of climate warming and attributing them to identifiable emitters.
The figures are spectacular. Between 1990 and 2020, the emissions of the United States would have caused $10.2 trillion in global economic losses, versus $8.7 trillion for China and $6.4 trillion for the European Union. On the corporate side, Saudi Aramco emerges as the leading private emitter, with $3.0 trillion in damages already attributable to its emissions by 2020.
The novelty is not only statistical. It is political, economic and potentially judicial. For the study does not yet say what the major emitters will have to pay. It first establishes what they have cost. And this difference could redraw the way the world now thinks about climate accountability.
An unprecedented methodology
The major weakness of climate remedies up to now lay in a problem of proof. How to demonstrate that a state or a specific company contributed to a particular economic damage, when greenhouse gas emissions mingle in a common atmosphere?
