Record-breaking climate extremes in Africa under stabilized 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming scenarios

Shingirai Nangombe, Tianjun Zhou (), Wenxia Zhang, Bo Wu, Shuai Hu, Liwei Zou and Donghuan Li
Additional contact information
Shingirai Nangombe: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Tianjun Zhou: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Wenxia Zhang: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Bo Wu: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Shuai Hu: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Liwei Zou: Chinese Academy of Sciences
Donghuan Li: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Nature Climate Change, 2018, vol. 8, issue 5, 375-380

Abstract: Abstract Anthropogenic forcing is anticipated to increase the magnitude and frequency of extreme events 1 , the impacts of which will be particularly hard-felt in already vulnerable locations such as Africa 2 . However, projected changes in African climate extremes remain little explored, particularly in the context of the Paris Agreement targets3,4. Here, using Community Earth System Model low warming simulations 5 , we examine how heat and hydrological extremes may change in Africa under stabilized 1.5 °C and 2 °C scenarios, focusing on the projected changing likelihood of events that have comparable magnitudes to observed record-breaking seasons. In the Community Earth System Model, limiting end-of-century warming to 1.5 °C is suggested to robustly reduce the frequency of heat extremes compared to 2 °C. In particular, the probability of events similar to the December–February 1991/1992 southern African and 2009/2010 North African heat waves is estimated to be reduced by 25 ± 5% and 20 ± 4%, respectively, if warming is limited to 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C. For hydrometeorological extremes (that is, drought and heavy precipitation), by contrast, signal differences are indistinguishable from the variation between ensemble members. Thus, according to this model, continued efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C offer considerable benefits in terms of minimizing heat extremes and their associated socio-economic impacts across Africa.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0145-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:8:y:2018:i:5:d:10.1038_s41558-018-0145-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0145-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().