“People are mostly focused on the physical reallocation of these assets, but I don’t think we’ve really started thinking enough about how climate change can reallocate wealth and influence the prices of those assets,” said Fenichel, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “We think these price impacts can be really, really important.”



“We don’t know how this will unfold, but we do know there will be price effects. It’s just Economics 101 — prices reflect quantity and scarcity and natural capital is hard for people to move,” he said. “It’s as inevitable as the movement of these fish species.”



These impacts on the value of natural capital highlight the need for coherent climate policies that integrate biophysical and social measurements, the authors say.



The study was conducted by researchers at Yale, Rutgers, Princeton, and Arizona State universities.



The paper illustrates how the inclusive wealth framework advocated by UNEP and the World Bank makes it possible to measure the shift in the amounts and distribution of wealth as a consequence of climate change, when coupled with approaches to value natural capital developed by Fenichel and others. As an example, the researchers used fish migration data collected by Malin Pinsky, an assistant professor at Rutgers and co-author of the study.



“We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology,” Pinsky said. “But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment we don’t have a good understanding for the impacts of human behavior on natural resources affected by climate change.”



To illustrate their case, the authors model potential outcomes in two fictitious fishing communities (Northport and Southport) in the face of climate-driven shifts in fish populations. Southport’s fish stocks decline as the climate changes while Northport’s stock increases; it’s a scenario that reflects changes anticipated in areas such as the mid-Atlantic and the waters off New England in the eastern U.S.