Multisectoral climate impact hotspots in a warming world

The impacts of global climate change on different aspects of humanity’s diverse life-support systems are complex and often difficult to predict. To facilitate policy decisions on mitigation and adaptation strategies, it is necessary to understand, quantify, and synthesize these climate-change impacts, taking into account their uncertainties. Crucial to these decisions is an understanding of how impacts in different sectors overlap, as overlapping impacts increase exposure, lead to interactions of impacts, and are likely to raise adaptation pressure.

As a first step we develop herein a framework to study coinciding impacts and identify regional exposure hotspots. This framework can then be used as a starting point for regional case studies on vulnerability and multifaceted adaptation strategies. We consider impacts related to water, agriculture, ecosystems, and malaria at different levels of global warming. Multisectoral overlap starts to be seen robustly at a mean global warming of 3 °C above the 1980–2010 mean, with 11% of the world population subject to severe impacts in at least two of the four impact sectors at 4 °C. Despite these general conclusions, we find that uncertainty arising from the impact models is considerable, and larger than that from the climate models.

Authors

Franziska Pionteka, Christoph Müller, Thomas A. M. Pugh, Douglas B. Clark, Delphine Deryng, Joshua Elliott, Felipe de Jesus Colón González, Martina Flörke, Christian Folberth, Wietse Franssen, Katja Frieler, Andrew D. Friend, Simon N. Gosling, Deborah Hemming, Nikolay Khabarov, Hyungjun Kim, Mark R. Lomas, Yoshimitsu Masaki, Matthias Mengel, Andrew Morse, Kathleen Neumann, Kazuya Nishina, Sebastian Ostberg, Ryan Pavlick, Alex C. Ruane, Jacob Schewe, Erwin Schmid, Tobias Stacke, Qiuhong Tang, Zachary D. Tessler, Adrian M. Tompkins, Lila Warszawski, Dominik Wisser, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

Specifications

Publication title
Multisectoral climate impact hotspots in a warming world
Publication date
4 June 2014
Publication type
Publication
Magazine
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)
Product number
1530