Quantifying assets for the geopolitics of climate change mitigation

Abstract Climate change mitigation reshapes the distribution of economic assets in the low-carbon transition. Here we quantify climate-related assets for 169 countries across four dimensions: fossil fuel production, climate change damages, renewable energy potential and land carbon sequestration capacity. We combine integrated assessment models, climate projections, economic damage functions and biosphere datasets to assess asset changes under multiple mitigation scenarios. Geopolitical challenges and opportunities arise from climate change mitigation because losses and gains across energy and environmental assets are country-specific, which we further characterize through a broad clustering and a detailed pairwise similarity analysis. Our analysis suggests comparatively moderate impacts for the USA, the European Union and China, highlighting the challenge that the largest economic powers may not be those with the strongest asset-based interest for climate action. While our framework remains limited, our data provide input for integrating other ethical, governance and socioeconomic factors in future analyses of opportunities and challenges for ambitious climate change mitigation.