Today’s children to experience two to seven times more extremes than their grandparents

"A huge opportunity": Phasing out fossil fuels can limit risks

“The good news: we can indeed take much of the climate burden from our childrens’ shoulders if we limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by phasing out fossil fuel use,” says Katja Frieler who is coordinating ISIMIP, she’s a leading scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study. “If we increase climate protection from current emission reduction pledges and get in line with a 1.5 degree target, we will reduce young people’s potential exposure to extreme events on average by 24% globally. For North America it’s minus 26%, for Europe and Central Asia minus 28%, and in the Middle East and North Africa even minus 39%. This is a huge opportunity.”

For instance, under a scenario of current insufficient climate policies dangerous heatwaves that affect 15% of global land area today could increase to 46%, hence triple by the end of the century. Yet limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, which is the ambition of the Paris Climate Agreement signed by almost all countries worldwide, would reduce the affected land area to 22%. This is more than today but significantly less than with unmitigated warming.

First analysis of this kind with focus on generations

The analysis is the first of its kind. To assess age-dependent extreme event exposure, the researchers took a collection of multi-model climate impact projections from the ISIMIP project building on the work of dozens of research groups worldwide. The researchers combined this with country-scale life-expectancy data, population data and  temperature trajectories from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).