EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Avoiding population exposure to heat-related extremes: demographic change vs climate change

Bryan Jones (), Claudia Tebaldi, Brian C. O’Neill, Keith Oleson and Jing Gao
Additional contact information
Bryan Jones: Baruch College, CUNY Institute for Demographic Research
Claudia Tebaldi: National Center for Atmospheric Research
Brian C. O’Neill: National Center for Atmospheric Research
Keith Oleson: National Center for Atmospheric Research
Jing Gao: National Center for Atmospheric Research

Climatic Change, 2018, vol. 146, issue 3, No 11, 423-437

Abstract: Abstract Heat waves are among the most dangerous climate-related hazards, and they are projected to increase in frequency and intensity over the coming century. Exposure to heat waves is a function of the spatial distribution of physical events and the corresponding population distribution, and future exposure will be impacted by changes in both distributions. Here, we project future exposure using ensembles of climate projections that account for the urban heat island effect, for two alternative emission scenarios (RCP4.5/RCP8.5) and two alternative population and urbanization (SSP3/SSP5) outcomes. We characterize exposure at the global, regional, and grid-cell level; estimate the exposure that would be avoided by mitigating future levels of climate change (to RCP4.5); and quantify the dependence of exposure on population outcomes. We find that climate change is a stronger determinant of exposure than demographic change in these scenarios, with a global reduction in exposure of over 50% under a lower emissions pathway, while a slower population growth pathway leads to roughly 30% less exposure. Exposure reduction varies at the regional level, but in almost all cases, the RCP remains more influential than the SSP. Uncertainty in outcomes is dominated by inter-annual variability in heat extremes (relative to variability across initial condition ensemble members). For some regions, this variability is large enough that a reduction in annual exposure is not guaranteed in each individual year by following the lower forcing pathway. Finally, we find that explicitly considering the urban heat island effect and separate urban and rural heat extremes and populations can substantially influence results, generally increasing projected exposure.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-017-2133-7 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:spr:climat:v:146:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-017-2133-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-017-2133-7

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:climat:v:146:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-017-2133-7