Identifying the Local Economic Development Impacts of Global Climate Change

The need to evaluate and plan for the region-specific economic development impacts of potential global climate change is receiving increasing attention. This article presents a method for estimating such consequences and the results of exploratory research that applies this method to determining the employment impacts in a recreationally based region. The research results demonstrate that climate variation over the past 20 years has had significant development impacts. For the Pere Marquette Watershed region of central-western Michigan, the analysis shows that employment in the construction; farming; finance, insurance, and real estate; manufacturing; residuals; services; trade; and transportation/utilities sectors of the region is sensitive to climate variation.