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Understanding the risks of the physical impacts and economic damages associated with different levels of future climate change is essential to informing policy decisions designed to address these risks. Proposed policies to mitigate greenhouse gases (GHGs) have generally been focused around specific temperature or emissions targets, such as limiting global average temperature change to 2 °C above preindustrial levels (IPCC 2014 ) or reducing GHG emissions to 80 % below 2005 levels by 2050 (White House 2013 ). Many analyses of the potential costs of these proposals have been conducted (US Environmental Protection Agency 2010 ; US Energy Information Administration 2009 ). However, the benefits of GHG mitigation – the reduced or avoided damages due to the policy – have not been as thoroughly analyzed.
Waldhoff et al. (Mon,) studied this question.