State-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes

  • Global impact models represent process-level understanding of how natural and human systems may be affected by climate change. Their projections are used in integrated assessments of climate change. Here we test, for the first time, systematically across many important systems, how well such impact models capture the impacts of extreme climate conditions. Using the 2003 European heat wave and drought as a historical analogue for comparable events in the future, we find that a majority of models underestimate the extremeness of impacts in important sectors such as agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, and heat-related human mortality, while impacts on water resources and hydropower are overestimated in some river basins; and the spread across models is often large. This has important implications for economic assessments of climate change impacts that rely on these models. It also means that societal risks from future extreme events may be greater than previously thought.
Metadaten
Author:Jacob Schewe, Simon N. GoslingORCiDGND, Christopher Reyer, Hannes Müller SchmiedORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-484768
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08745-6
ISSN:2041-1723
Pubmed Id:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30824763
Parent Title (English):Nature Communications
Publisher:Nature Publishing Group UK
Place of publication:[London]
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of Completion:2019
Date of first Publication:2019/03/01
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2019/03/12
Tag:Climate change; Climate sciences; Environmental impact; Water resources
Volume:10
Issue:1, Art. 1005
Page Number:14
First Page:1
Last Page:14
Note:
Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
HeBIS-PPN:448048620
Institutes:Geowissenschaften / Geographie / Geowissenschaften
Angeschlossene und kooperierende Institutionen / Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft
Fachübergreifende Einrichtungen / Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum (BiK-F)
Dewey Decimal Classification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 55 Geowissenschaften, Geologie / 550 Geowissenschaften
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0