Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes
Abstract
Under continued global warming, extreme events such as heat waves will continue to rise in frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent over the next decades (1–4). Younger generations are therefore expected to face more such events across their lifetimes compared with older generations. This raises important issues of solidarity and fairness across generations (5, 6) that have fueled a surge of climate protests led by young people in recent years and that underpin issues of intergenerational equity raised in recent climate litigation. However, the standard scientific paradigm is to assess climate change in discrete time windows or at discrete levels of warming (7), a “period” approach that inhibits quantification of how much more extreme events a particular generation will experience over its lifetime compared with another. By developing a “cohort” perspective to quantify changes in lifetime exposure to climate extremes and compare across generations (see the first figure), we estimate that children born in 2020 will experience a two- to sevenfold increase in extreme events, particularly heat waves, compared with people born in 1960, under current climate policy pledges. Our results highlight a severe threat to the safety of young generations and call for drastic emission reductions to safeguard their future.
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References and Notes
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Science
Volume 374 | Issue 6564
8 October 2021
8 October 2021
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
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Published in print: 8 October 2021
Acknowledgments
For their roles in producing, coordinating, and making available the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP; www.isimip.org) input data and impact model output, we acknowledge the modeling groups, the ISIMIP sector coordinators, and the ISIMIP cross-sectoral science team. W.T. thanks J. Steyaert and V. Leroy for sparking the idea that led to this study. U. Beyerle and the ETH Zurich cluster team are thanked for support with the CLM4.5 simulations. We also thank the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for maintaining CLM (Community Land Model) and making the source code publicly available. T.G. and S.N.W. acknowledge support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the research projects SLICE (FKZ: 01LA1829A) and CLIC (FKZ: 01LA1817C), respectively. C.-F.S. acknowledges support by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ: 01LS1905A). N.H. was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (JPMEERF20182R02). S.I.S. acknowledges partial support from the European Research Council (ERC) through the ERC Proof-of-concept grant MESMER-X under H2020-EU.1.1 (grant 964013). A.K. acknowledges support through the FP7 project HELIX (grant 603864). S.L., K.F., T.G., M.B., J.V., M.M., and C.P.O.R. acknowledge funding from BMBF under the ERA4CS project ISIPedia (FKZ: 01LS1711A). F.Z. thanks the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC1503001). V.H. received support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (grant PCIN-2017-046). C.P.O.R. acknowledges funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 821010 (CASCADES) and J.R. under number 820829 (CONSTRAIN).
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