The Diverse Impact of Severe Heatwaves: A Generation Divide
Future generations face the greatest impact
Welcome to the grim reality that awaits the child generation as they grapple with the harsh effects of climate change. According to a recently published study, individuals born after 2020 are more likely to endure extreme heatwaves compared to their elderly counterparts. And things might only get worse.
Let's say you're a five-year-old in 2020. If the global temperature increase is capped at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, there's a good chance you'll experience heatwaves never seen before in your lifetime. A staggering 52 percent of today's five-year-olds face this fate, while the figure for a 1960-born individual is a much-reduced 16 percent. These revelations come from a team led by Luke Grant from the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, published in the journal "Nature".
As the world heats up, we're seeing a noticeable increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. "Human influences have been detected in heatwaves, river floods, droughts, crop failures, and certain aspects of wildfires and tropical cyclones," the team explains. But until now, little research has focused on the extent to which individual people will feel the impact of these events. Using climate models and demographic data, the researchers attempted to predict the number of people who will be exposed to unprecedented stress from extreme events throughout their lifetime.
Multiple Scenarios
The researchers looked at three scenarios, each with a different average global surface temperature in 2100: 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 degrees higher than pre-industrial levels. They then calculated the potential consequences for people born in different years.
In the best-case scenario (1.5 degrees), roughly 120 million people born in 2020 could be exposed to extreme heatwave stress. Under more catastrophic conditions (3.5 degrees), that number soars to 92 percent. With additional cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the world could maintain a 1.5-degree increase, potentially sparing 613 million people born between 2003 and 2020 from suffering unprecedented heatwave stress.
Those Most Affected
"Our results underscore the urgent need for comprehensive and sustainable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to alleviate the burden of today's young generations from the impacts of climate change," the authors state. They define unprecedented stress from extreme events as a probability of less than 1 in 10,000 that a person would experience the same stress in a world without climate change. The authors also acknowledge limitations in their study, such as the absence of factors like internal migration.
Tidbit: Global Consequences The research team's findings also reveal differences in exposure between people in wealthier and poorer nations. In a 2.7-degree warming world with current policies, the most vulnerable populations will experience the highest heatwave exposure rates.
Source: ntv.de, kst/dpa
- Extreme weather
- Heatwave
- Global warming
- Climate change
- The study published in the journal "Nature" suggests that individuals born after 2020, especially five-year-olds, are more likely to experience extreme heatwaves due to climate change and global warming.
- As global warming progresses, there's a possibility that a five-year-old in 2020 could encounter heatwaves never before experienced, with a startling 52 percent chance under a 1.5-degree Celsius temperature increase.
- Scientific research indicates that human influences have led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, and this trend is expected to continue.
- The researchers in this study calculated the number of people exposed to unprecedented stress from extreme events throughout their lifetime, using climate models and demographic data.
- The authors stressed the need for comprehensive and sustainable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to alleviate the burden on the current young generations from the impacts of climate change and extreme weather.
