TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schewe, Jacob
A1  - Gosling, Simon N.
A1  - Reyer, Christopher
A1  - Müller Schmied, Hannes
T1  - State-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes
T2  - Nature Communications
N2  - 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.
KW  - Climate change
KW  - Climate sciences
KW  - Environmental impact
KW  - Water resources
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48476
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-484768
SN  - 2041-1723
N1  - 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/.
VL  - 10
IS  - 1, Art. 1005
SP  - 1
EP  - 14
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
CY  - [London]
ER  -