Not serious about climate change and its impact on human life? Consider the startling findings of a paper published February 24 in the journal Nature Climate Change, which could push you to reconsider your viewpoint. The study has claimed that as the planet has been warming, earthly objects such as trees, plants, fish and other natural resources have been constantly shifting their base towards the poles, in the direction of higher elevations and deeper into the seas.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Eli Fenichel, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, who cited the example of fish saying money was bound to flow in places wherever the marine life migrated.

The shifting of resources, a natural capital that has major economic value, is likely to impact developing nations more as these countries are majorly dependent on natural resources.

The study findings recommend that merely noting biophysical changes, such as the increase of fish in one place and the decrease in another, won’t be enough for policymakers as they would have to take into consideration “inclusive wealth”.

By inclusive wealth, scientists mean an economic framework that accounts for the sum of traditional, human and natural capital. It is a mechanism that can be applied to track the broader impacts of climate change on local and global sustainability and to measure any country’s ability to sustain human well-being.

“If the northern community isn’t a particularly good steward or manager, they’re going to place a low value on that windfall they just inherited,” Fenichel says. “So the aggregate could go down.”

Fenichel added that people mostly focus on physical reallocation of these assets, but he does not think that policymakers have really started thinking enough about how climate change can reallocate wealth and influence the prices of those assets.