Worldwide benefits of fair climate finance and mitigation

Economic damages from climate change are rising worldwide, though the burden is unevenly distributed. Despite this, progress under the UNFCCC towards global agreements on financing mitigation, adaptation, and responses to losses and damages has been slow. Integrated approaches to analyzing climate impacts and mitigation in the context of fair financing remain limited. Instead, climate change mitigation modelling has primarily focused on global cost-effectiveness without explicitly addressing regional inequalities in both responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Here, by integrating damages, mitigation, and fairness into one framework, we show that stringent mitigation efforts supported by fair financing could halve global economic damages in 2050 compared to projections under current trends, with net benefits for all regions. Investing in mitigation could save $0.5 trillion in annual climate finance by 2030 and $2.5 trillion by 2050, reducing the disproportionate burden on low-emitting regions such as Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Under current emissions trends, we estimate global damages of $1.5-7.5 trillion in 2030, requiring $0.55-$4.3 trillion/year in climate finance, substantially higher than the most recent climate finance commitments under the UNFCCC agreements. Our findings emphasize that proactive investment in mitigation and resilience is not only cost-effective but essential for limiting damages and reducing global inequality.