| Project Detail |
The lifetime impact of climate change on people
Global warming leads to increased frequency, intensity and duration of extreme events such as heatwaves. Studies on the impact of climate change often fail to consider how vulnerability and climate risk change over a lifetime. Demographic research often neglects the effects of climate change on population dynamics and vulnerability. The ERC-funded LACRIMA project aims to identify the impacts of climate change and associated risks from a cohort perspective. The project will use machine learning to reconstruct significant climate change impacts, such as heat-related mortality and areas affected by wildfires. Additionally, it will identify age-specific vulnerabilities to climate extremes, quantify how these impacts affect life expectancy globally, and project how exposure to extreme events may lead to irreversible consequences.
Under a continued increase in global warming, extreme events such as heatwaves will further rise in frequency, intensity, and duration over the next decades. Climate change impact studies routinely assess hazard and exposure change across discrete time windows, but thereby fail to grasp how vulnerability and climate risk evolve across a person’s lifetime. Conversely, demographic research has a long tradition of assessing population processes and vulnerability from a cohort perspective, but generally ignores climate impacts.
This project will develop novel concepts and methodologies to express climate change impacts and risk from a cohort perspective. More specifically, the project pursues (i) to reconstruct two iconic climate change impacts on people around the world using machine learning (heat-related mortality and burned area), (ii) to uncover age-specific vulnerability to climate extremes including heatwaves, wildfires, river floods, droughts, tropical cyclones, and crop failures, (iii) to detect and attribute changes in lifetime extreme event exposure and climate impacts on mortality across generations and regions, (iv) to quantify how these attributable cohort impacts change country-level life expectancy around the world under a range of warming scenarios, and finally (v) to project how lifetime exposure to extreme events including compound events may trigger irreversible impacts under scenarios of temporary overshooting of long-term warming targets.
By bridging physical climate science, demography, and planetary health, LACRIMA will comprehensively identify whether and where people will live an unprecedented life in terms of climate impacts, and how collective mitigation choices can alter the climate change burden on current young generations around the world. |
