Heat-stress mortality risk aggravated by climate change to hit poorest nations the hardest

Climate change has increased the likelihood of extremely hot summers, subsequently imposing substantial health risks to human lives. In order to facilitate adaptation planning strategies, it is essential to quantify global warming impacts and characterize its associated uncertainties. Here, we acquired daily climate projections from an ensemble of 17 regional climate models (RCMs) to quantify the mortality risk caused by excessive heat stress for the people aged over 65 years. A spatially explicit empirical health risk model is employed, and the analysis is performed during the historical period of 1951-2005 as well as RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 projections during 2006-2100 across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The results show that mortality risk is expected to intensify by a factor of 8-20 in the last 30 years of the 21^st century if no climate change mitigation planning is undertaken. Whereas, limiting global warming to 2°C will raise the mortality risk by a factor of 3-7 for the same period. Additional analyses revealed that increasing frequency of warm days (due to global warming) is more impactful on mortality risk than their intensity. The results also indicate that unfortunately, the poorest countries with least contribution to climate change are expected to be most impacted, and they will experience higher mortality risk compared to the wealthier nations.

Link to paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-018-2348-2