The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

Tom Pugh

Thomas Pugh

Senior lecturer

Tom Pugh

Multisectoral climate impact hotspots in a warming world

Author

  • Franziska Piontek
  • 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
Show all

Summary, in English

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. In a low probability-high impact worst-case assessment, almost the whole inhabited world is at risk for multisectoral pressures. Hence, there is a pressing need for an increased research effort to develop a more comprehensive understanding of impacts, as well as for the development of policy measures under existing uncertainty.

Publishing year

2014-03-04

Language

English

Pages

3233-3238

Publication/Series

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Volume

111

Issue

9

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

National Academy of Sciences

Topic

  • Environmental Sciences

Keywords

  • Coinciding pressures
  • Differential climate impacts
  • ISI-MIP

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0027-8424