Climate change's hidden price tag: a drop in our income

University of Arizona

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

For decades, economists have focused on how climate change will impact the future. New research from Derek Lemoine, APS Professor of Economics in the Eller College of Management, shows the impact is already here: climate change has reduced U.S. income by an estimated 12%.

Lemoine, co-director of the university's Consortium of Environmentally Resilient Business, said measuring climate change's current economic impact has big-picture implications when it comes to policymaking and business investment.

"If we can't figure out what climate change is already costing us with the data we have, projecting the future becomes almost hopeless," said Lemoine, lead author of the study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lemoine added that previous research largely focused on local, short-term weather changes alone, which, by his model, had a negative impact on U.S. income of less than 1%. When he accounted for climate change's year-after-year persistence and nationwide reach as well as connections between regional economies, the income loss jumped to about 12% – comparable to a major national policy shift. While the exact number is uncertain, Lemoine said the true effect is clearly far larger than 1%.

"A lot of the real cost comes from how temperature changes across the whole country ripple through prices and trade," he added. "It's not just about the weather where we live. When every region is affected at the same time, the economic consequences add up quickly."

A new approach

To measure climate change as an ongoing economic force, Lemoine worked with climate models simulating the world with and without human emissions to figure out how different each county's weather would have been if there was no climate change. He then combined county-level data on daily temperature with county-level personal income per capita from the Bureau of Economic Analysis covering 1969-2019. By doing this, he was able to measure how income historically changed with the number of hotter and colder days both locally and around the country, giving him a more detailed picture of the economic effects of shifting temperature patterns.

Lemoine said it's important to measure climate change's impact nationally, not locally.

"The reason the effects get so much larger is that climate change operates through the whole economy," Lemoine said. "Places are linked through trade, so temperatures in California or Iowa can influence income in Arizona. Those cross-state connections turn local weather changes into nationwide economic impacts."

Importantly, the study does not measure the economic impact of extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires or floods. Instead, it assesses how routine temperature shifts – like more hot days and fewer cold days – affect personal income. Lemoine said temperature is a useful measure because it can be tracked everywhere and provides a consistent way to link climate change to economic activity.

Why measuring matters

Approaching climate change as a continuous economic factor, rather than solely focusing on future projections, can reshape how businesses navigate the financial landscape. Year after year, temperature changes impact prices, productivity, regional trade and energy demand, all of which factor into business costs. Recognizing economic losses that have already occurred illustrates the importance of resilience planning for businesses, which Lemoine said can guide decisions ranging from location choices to insurance coverage.

"If you want to decide where to direct adaptation resources, you have to know what's already happening on the ground," Lemoine said. "Measuring the current economic effects of climate change helps businesses and policymakers understand where risks are emerging right now."

Lemoine said the data could also help inform policy design, where debates often center on predicting climate damages 50-100 years into the future. He believes agencies could use a framework like his to regularly publish the economic cost of climate change, similar to how they track other economic indicators such as employment or inflation. With a clearer picture of how climate change is affecting the economy now, Lemoine said policymakers could make more informed decisions about where adaptation funding is needed most and what industries and regions are being hit the hardest.

The research also aligns with the mission of the Arizona Institute for Resilience, which focuses on designing environmental and social systems that anticipate and integrate with global change. The institute helped launch the project with early-stage funding.

Real-time insight

Lemoine hopes his research offers a novel, data-driven way to understand climate damages as they happen using a framework that could be expanded globally. As more data and climate effects are included, he says the calculation would become more precise and more actionable.

"We would love to know how this number is changing over time," Lemoine said. "That's exactly why I think its calculation should be institutionalized, so that we calculate numbers like this every year."

---

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2504376122 

Article Publication Date

16-Dec-2025

PCORI awards funding for new patient-centered healthcare research

New CER studies address a broad range of adult and pediatric health needs

Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is a nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to fund patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER). CER compares two or more health care options, generating evidence about any differences in potential benefits or harms to empower patients, caregivers and other health care decision makers with information to make informed choices that reflect their needs and preferences. PCORI emphasizes the engagement of patients, caregivers and the broader health care community in all aspects of PCORI-funded research and research-related activities, including the dissemination and uptake of research findings.

view more 

Credit: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Every day, Americans face health care decisions without the information needed to fully understand the potential benefits and risks of different treatment options. To help close these evidence gaps and empower individuals and their caregivers with the information needed to make more informed health care decisions, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) announced funding awards for new patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) studies addressing a range of adult and pediatric health concerns.

 

“Patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research helps address important questions about different health care options in real-world settings,” said PCORI Executive Director Nakela L. Cook, M.D., MPH. “These newly funded studies will generate evidence to help people across the nation better understand their health and health care options, make more informed health care decisions and improve their health outcomes.”

 

Funding highlights

 

• Eleven new patient-centered CER studies addressing a range of pediatric and adult health challenges
• Eight studies advancing CER methods, including strategies for meaningful patient and stakeholder engagement
• One project supporting the implementation of PCORI-funded CER findings into real-world clinical settings

 

Addressing real-world health challenges

 

Several of the newly awarded patient-centered CER studies will focus on mental and behavioral health:

• Two studies will compare approaches to prevent suicide — a leading cause of death among youth and adults.
• One study will compare telehealth approaches to reduce strain for caregivers of people with dementia.
• Another will compare medication strategies for managing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children and adolescents.

 

Two additional CER studies will focus on kidney-related care:

• One will compare outcomes for people receiving daily in-home dialysis versus dialysis schedules with days off between sessions.
• The other will compare an observational approach to surgical intervention for asymptomatic kidney stones in children and adults.

 

Other newly funded CER studies address cardiovascular health and care transitions:

• A large trial will compare the use of a step-tracking mobile phone app alone to the app combined with a gamification-based intervention, measuring which approach is more effective at increasing physical activity and reducing major adverse cardiovascular events among high-risk adults.
• Another trial will compare two acute care transition programs for older adults, assessing whether adding structured caregiver support reduces hospital readmissions and improves health and wellbeing for individuals and their caregivers.

 

Strengthening CER methods and impact

 

PCORI is also funding studies aimed at enhancing the rigor and relevance of CER:

• Five studies address high-priority methodological gaps in patient-centered CER.

• Three studies focus on strengthening the evidence base to effectively engage patients and other health and health care decision makers throughout the design and conduct of patient-centered CER.

 

Accelerating uptake of PCORI-funded research results

 

PCORI continues to fund initiatives that help the use of research findings in real-world clinical practice. A newly funded implementation project will expand access to an early childhood obesity prevention program in dozens of clinics across five states.

 

For more information about the new awards, visit PCORI.org.

 

All award funding has been approved pending final PCORI contractual considerations.

 

About PCORI 

 

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) is a nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to fund patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER). CER compares two or more health care options, generating evidence about any differences in potential benefits or harms to empower patients, caregivers and other health care decision makers with information to make informed choices that reflect their needs and preferences. PCORI emphasizes the engagement of patients, caregivers and the broader health care community in all aspects of PCORI-funded research and research-related activities, including the dissemination and uptake of research findings.

Federally funded clinical trial suggests knowing HIV ‘viral load’ doesn’t improve number of patients seeking needed care

Johns Hopkins Medicine/CDC study finds no difference overall in linkage-to-care rates if next-day testing is done to quantify number of HIV particles in a patient

Johns Hopkins Medicine

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other sources, there are approximately 1.2 million people living with HIV in the United States, and another 1.2 to 2.2 million who are at highest risk for infection and could benefit from the preventive measure known as HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). 

HIV viral load testing — a laboratory-based measurement of the amount of HIV in someone’s blood — is used to diagnose HIV infection at its earliest stages, monitor the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy (ART) in keeping the virus at undetectable levels, and assess if the virus has developed any resistance to ART. 

However, one question about viral load testing has remained unanswered: Does knowing one’s HIV viral load test result increase the “linkage-to-care” rates for seeking ART for an active infection or PrEP if not infected, but at high risk? 

In a study published today in JAMA Network Open, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and CDC report that the answer may be no. 

“We conducted a randomized clinical trial of 195 adults — including people who were living with HIV but not taking ART and people identified with risk factors [such as multiple sexual partners, evaluation for sexually transmitted infections or injection drug use] for acquiring HIV,” says study lead author Matthew Hamill, M.B.Ch.B., Ph.D., M.P.H., associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We randomly assigned 98 people into the intervention group who received a next-day HIV viral load test and standard-of-care [SOC] HIV testing, and 97 people into the control group who only received SOC HIV testing. Then, we monitored them for 12 weeks to see if they sought care during that time, and if so, exactly when that happened.” 

Hamill says linkage to care is defined as a person seeking care for a diagnosed medical condition or to initiate preventive therapy. “For example, when a smoker joins a smoking cessation program or a pregnant woman starts seeing an obstetrician for prenatal care, that counts as linkage,” he explains. 

The study participants ranged in age from 27 to 47 years, with a median age of 36. Thirty-nine percent were female, 57.4% were Black, 26.2% were white and 16.4% were other ethnicities. The majority of the participants (63.1%) were recruited between August 2021 and January 2023 from a Baltimore, Maryland, emergency department, with the rest (26.7%) enrolled via a social media campaign and other means. 

The median time for participants to receive their test results was six hours for standard-of-care testing (HIV antigen/antibody detection only) and 26 hours for viral load testing (quantifying the number of HIV particles in the blood sample). 

“Overall, 93 participants of the 195 total, or 48%, attended the 12-week follow-up visit with one of our team members and 69, or 35%, had been linked to care by that time,” says senior study author Yuka Manabe, M.D., professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Center for Innovative Diagnostics for Infectious Diseases. “Overall, we found there was no difference in linkage to care rates between the groups, suggesting that knowing the results of a viral load test does not significantly improve the rates by which people seek treatment or prevention care for HIV.” 

However, Manabe says that one subgroup of those receiving viral load testing — the participants living with HIV — did have higher linkage-to-care rates, even if it took a day to get results. 

Hamill and Manabe suspect that linkage-to-care rates would be higher overall if people got their viral load results sooner than a day after testing. 

“That’s one of the things we hope to study in future clinical trials: Does more immediate feedback on viral counts sway people to start treatment or preventive care right away?” says Hamill. “We also want to see if it helps to offer PrEP treatment immediately after testing shows a person is HIV negative. It’s likely more effective than saying ‘Come back in a week when your lab results are ready.’ ” 

Along with Hamill and Manabe, the members of the research team from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are M. Harris Bayan, Tanique Bennett, Alec Boudreau, Zoe Demko, Susan Eshleman, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh, Nyah Johnson, Agha Mizra, Elizabeth Nielsen, Nisha Ramdeep, Benji Riggan, Richard Rothman, Travis Smalls and Thelio Sewell. Team members from the CDC are Pollyanna Chavez, Kevin Delaney, Nathalie Gonzalez-Jimenez and Robin MacGowan. 

Federal funding for the study comes from CDC grant U01PS005204-01-00. 

Hamill has been a paid speaker for Roche Diagnostics, a company that provided a product used in this study. 

None of the other authors had any conflict-of-interest disclosures to report.

---

Journal

JAMA Network Open

 

A new technique predicts the ripeness of fruit by analyzing leaves

The method, developed by a research team at URV, analyzes the biochemical changes in the leaves closest to the fruit without damaging it

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Daniel Schorn

view more 

Credit: URV

How can you tell if fruit has reached its optimal ripeness without picking it, touching it or carrying out any test that might damage it? A research team from the Department of Analytical Chemistry and Organic Chemistry at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) has found the answer by applying near- and mid-infrared spectroscopy to the leaves closest to the fruit. They discovered that the technique allows reliable information to be obtained about the fruit’s developmental state without damaging it.

The study addresses a common challenge in the fruit sector: traditional techniques for assessing fruit quality – such as measuring firmness, sugar content or acidity – require collecting and analysing samples, which means a portion of the crop is destroyed and cannot be sold. Furthermore, spectroscopic techniques applied directly to the fruit can leave marks on its skin. This research team’s proposal focuses a little further away from the fruit by analysing instead the nearby leaves; this enables them to determine the physiological changes that occur as the fruit ripens without having to touch it.

The technique that they used in their research, near- and mid-infrared spectroscopy, directs a beam of light at a sample (in this case, the leaves) and, from the light that is absorbed or reflected, information is obtained about its composition without altering or destroying the sample. “The leaves undergo physiological and biochemical changes as the fruit ripens, due to the direct connection between the metabolism of the leaves and that of the fruit. And these changes are reflected in their spectral fingerprint,” explains Daniel Schorn, a researcher in the ChemoSens research group at URV who took part in this study. By applying this technique weekly to the leaves closest to the fruit, the research team has managed to “read” the fruit’s developmental state without touching it.

---

Journal

ACS Agricultural Science & Technology

DOI

10.1021/acsagscitech.4c00760 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Article Title

Spectroscopic Analysis of Proximal Leaves as a Method for Studying Nectarine Ripening

The research team has subjected the leaves near the fruit to the technique of near and mid-infrared spectroscopy.

The system allows monitoring the optimal point for harvesting the fruit.

Credit

URV