Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Today’s children will endure exposure to more climate extremes in their lifetime than any generation before them, a new study published in Nature has projected.
Climate extremes, including heatwaves, crop failures, river floods, tropical cyclones, wildfires and droughts, will increase in frequency and intensity with continued atmospheric warming.
Global average temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates due to greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by human activities. These gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, prevent heat from escaping into space, adding more energy to Earth’s systems.
Under current global mitigation policies, which puts us on the path to 2.7 °C above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100 according to Climate Action Tracker, the study estimates that children born in 2020 will face 2-7 times more extreme climate events than those who were born in 1960.
The stark findings highlight “unfair generational differences” in the impacts of climate change and reinforce the need for effective strategies to rapidly reduce future greenhouse gas emissions to protect current and future generations.
Inger Ashing, CEO of Save the Children International who was not involved in the research, says across the world children are forced to bear the brunt of a crisis they are not responsible for.
“Dangerous heat that puts their health and learning at risk; cyclones that batter their homes and schools; creeping droughts that shrivel up crops and shrink what’s on their plates,” says Ashing.
“Amid this daily drumbeat of disasters, children plead with us not to switch off. This new research shows there is still hope, but only if we act urgently and ambitiously to rapidly limit warming temperatures to 1.5 °C, and truly put children front and centre of our response to climate change.”
The researchers calculated the number of people in each generation born between 1960 and 2020 who will face “unprecedented exposure” to climate extremes in their lifetime, by combining population projections, life expectancy data, and modelling of climate extremes.
“In this new study, living an unprecedented life means that without climate change, one would have less than a 1-in-10,000 chance of experiencing that many climate extremes across one’s lifetime” says Dr Luke Grant, the study’s lead author and a climate scientist at Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).
“This is a stringent threshold that identifies populations facing climate extremes far beyond what could be expected without man-made climate change,” says Grant. This threshold varies by location and type of climate extreme.
The study found that while about 16% of people born in 1960 have experienced extreme heatwaves globally, about half of today’s young people will be exposed to an unprecedented number of heatwaves in their lifetime even if the increase in the global average temperature is stabilised at about 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures in line with the goal of the Paris Agreement.
The study maps out how this exposure to extreme events varies with geographical location across the planet to shows that children in tropical countries will bear the worst burden under this 1.5°C scenario.
It shows if greenhouse gas emissions continue to climb under a high emissions pathway (3.5 °C), nearly all children born in 2020 worldwide will face unprecedented exposure to heatwaves in their lifetimes.
“Under a 3.5 °C scenario, over 90% will endure such exposure throughout their lives,” says Grant. Twenty-nine percent will live through unprecedented exposure to crop failures, and 14% will face unprecedented exposure to river floods.
The most socioeconomically vulnerable people of each generation will be hit worst, with consistently higher chance of unprecedented exposure to heatwaves compared with the least vulnerable members.
“What’s even more concerning is that younger generations might have fewer socio-economic resources and poorer health than their older counterparts,” Rosanna Gualdi and Professor Raya Muttarak from the University of Bologna, Italy, write in a related Nature News & Views article. Gualdi and Muttarak were not involved in the research.
“These socio-economic and health constraints might reduce the ability of younger generations to adapt to the challenges of climate change — which is worrying, because these people will be more exposed to future climate impacts.”
The researchers behind the Nature study say that children would reap the direct benefits of increased global ambition to limit global warming to 1.5 °C by 2100.
Relative to the 2.7 °C warming expected under current policies, they say that “…a total of 613 million children born between 2003 and 2020 would then avoid unprecedented lifetime exposure to heatwaves.
“For crop failures, this is 98 million, for river floods 64 million, for tropical cyclones 76 million, for droughts 26 million and for wildfires 17 million.”
According to the latest report by the Global Carbon Project, if we continue to emit CO2 at 2024 levels the remaining carbon budget to stabilise the climate at 1.5°C will be used up in just 6 years.
Dr Wim Thiery, professor of climate science at VUB and senior author of the study, urges that world leaders must step up to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lessen the climate burden on today’s youth.
