Today’s children to experience two to seven times more extremes than their grandparents

Press release by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

09/27/2021

Today’s children will be hit much harder by climate extremes than today’s adults, researchers show in the leading journal Science. During their lifetime, a child born in 2021 will experience on average twice as many wildfires, between two and three times more droughts, almost three times more river floods and crop failures, and seven times more heatwaves compared to a person who’s for instance 60 years old today, the researchers find based on data from the Inter-sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). This is under a scenario of current greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges by governments which will be a topic at the upcoming world climate summit COP26 in Glasgow.

“Our results highlight a severe threat to the safety of young generations and call for drastic emission reductions to safeguard their future,” says lead-author Wim Thiery from Vrije Universiteit Brussel. “We even have strong reasons to think that our calculations underestimate the actual increases that young people will face.” Regarding droughts, heatwaves, river floods and crop failures, people under the age of 40 today will live what the researchers call “an unprecedented life”.

“The good news: we can indeed take much of the climate burden from our childrens’ shoulders if we limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by phasing out fossil fuel use,” says Katja Frieler who is coordinating ISIMIP, she’s a leading scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study. “If we increase climate protection from current emission reduction pledges and get in line with a 1.5 degree target, we will reduce young people’s potential exposure to extreme events on average by 24% globally. For North America it’s minus 26%, for Europe and Central Asia minus 28%, and in the Middle East and North Africa even minus 39%. This is a huge opportunity.”

For instance, under a scenario of current insufficient climate policies dangerous heatwaves that affect 15% of global land area today could increase to 46%, hence triple by the end of the century. Yet limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, which is the ambition of the Paris Climate Agreement signed by almost all countries worldwide, would reduce the affected land area to 22%. This is more than today but significantly less than with unmitigated warming.

The analysis is the first of its kind. To assess age-dependent extreme event exposure, the researchers took a collection of multi-model climate impact projections from the ISIMIP project building on the work of dozens of research groups worldwide. The researchers combined this with country-scale life-expectancy data, population data and  temperature trajectories from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Article: Wim Thiery, Stefan Lange, Joeri Rogelj, Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Lukas Gudmundsson, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Marina Andrijevic, Katja Frieler, Kerry Emanuel, Tobias Geiger, David N. Bresch, Fang Zhao, Sven N. Willner, Matthias Büchner, Jan Volkholz, Nico Bauer, Jinfeng Chang, Philippe Ciais, Marie Dury, Louis François, Manolis Grillakis, Simon N. Gosling, Naota Hanasaki, Thomas Hickler, Veronika Huber, Akihiko Ito, Jonas Jägermeyr, Nikolay Khabarov, Aristeidis Koutroulis, Wenfeng Liu, Wolfgang Lutz, Matthias Mengel, Christoph Müller, Sebastian Ostberg, Christopher P. O. Reyer, Tobias Stacke, Yoshihide Wada (2021): Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes. Science[DOI:10.1126/science.abi7339]

Weblink to the article once it is published: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi7339

For further information please contact:
PIK press office
Phone: +49 331 288 25 07
E-Mail: press@pik-potsdam.de
www.pik-potsdam.de

Who we are: The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is one of the leading research institutions addressing relevant questions in the fields of global change, climate impacts and sustainable development. Natural and social scientists work closely together to generate interdisciplinary insights that provide a sound basis for decision-making for society, businesses and politics. PIK is a member of the Leibniz Association.

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