Climate Change and Economic Growth Prospects for Malawi: An Uncertainty Approach

Malawi confronts a growth and development imperative that it must meet in a context characterised by rising temperatures and deep uncertainty about trends in precipitation. This article evaluates the potential implications of climate change for overall growth and development prospects in Malawi. We combine climate, biophysical and economic models to develop a structural analysis focused on three primary impact channels: agriculture, road infrastructure and hydropower generation. We account explicitly for the uncertainty in climate forecasts by exploiting the best available information on the likely distribution of climate outcomes. We find that climate change is unlikely to substantially slow overall economic growth over the next couple of decades. However, assuming that global emissions remain effectively unconstrained, climate change implications become more pronounced over time. Reduced agricultural yields and increased damage to road