Get started
Work

A bottom-up social cost of carbon for Latin America: Municipality-level heat-mortality damage functions from 30 million daily death records

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Temperature–mortality response functions have been quantified across many climate zones, but for most of the developing world they have not been translated into country-specific economic damages at sub-national resolution. This study estimates bottom-up mortality social costs of carbon (SCC) for five Latin American countries at municipality resolution. We assemble 30 million daily death records across 10,214 municipality-equivalent units in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Ecuador and Peru (2000–2023) and merge them with the ARCO-ERA5 reanalysis sampled at every unit centroid. Country-specific Poisson exposure–response functions, estimated separately by country with municipality, year, month and day-of-week fixed effects, recover same-day heat-mortality semi-elasticities of 10.9% (Brazil) and 13.0% (Mexico) at a daily maximum temperature of 35 °C or above, relative to a 20–25 °C reference. Translating these functions along the SSP2-4.5 warming path, with the transient climate response to cumulative emissions, an income-driven attenuation of the response, a value-of-statistical-life path that rises with projected income, and population ageing, yields central mortality SCCs of about USD 0.5/tCO₂ in Brazil and USD 0.3/tCO₂ in Mexico at a 2% discount rate, with a small negative value for cool-climate Chile and near-zero values for Ecuador and Peru. These bottom-up, mortality-only estimates are a fraction of full-system country-level SCCs but share their cross-country ordering and signs, and the underlying damage functions imply a substantial annual heat-mortality burden that the sparse regional evidence in global assessments does not capture.
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aebfaf
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,045
OpenAlex ID: W7225651902
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: