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Extreme heat-related mortality avoided under Paris Agreement goals

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 551–553 (2018)Cite this article

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In key European cities, stabilizing climate warming at 1.5 °C would decrease extreme heat-related mortality by 15–22% per summer compared with stabilization at 2 °C.

There remains a paucity of studies into how risks differ between a 1.5 °C and a 2 °C world1, and the question this policy aspiration2 poses to the scientific community is what are the impacts avoided by stabilizing climate at 1.5 °C instead of 2 °C? Research has started to emerge for global changes in some specific sectors to address this question, such as the crop and water sectors3, but very little has emerged for regional impacts, especially from the health sector.

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Fig. 1: Distributions of heat-related summer mortality in current, 1.5 °C and 2 °C decade experiments.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Oppenheimer for valuable discussions on the manuscript. D.M. was supported by a NERC independent research fellowship (NE/NO14057/1). H.S. is supported by the ERTD Fund (2-1702) of ERCA and TOUGOU of MEXT, Japan. N.S. and J.S. received support from the Norwegian Research Council, project nos 261821 (HappiEVA) and 243953 (ClimateXL). AG is supported by the Medical Research Council UK (grant no. MR/M022625/1). This research used science gateway resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02- 05CH11231.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Daniel Mitchell

  2. Chemical and Environmental Effects Department, Public Health England, Oxford, UK

    Clare Heaviside

  3. School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Clare Heaviside & Sotiris Vardoulakis

  4. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

    Clare Heaviside, Antonio Gasparrini & Sotiris Vardoulakis

  5. Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo, Norway

    Nathalie Schaller & Jana Sillmann

  6. Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Myles Allen & Luke Harrington

  7. Department of Global Health, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Kristie L. Ebi

  8. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Erich M. Fischer

  9. Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change Canada, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Viatcheslav Kharin

  10. Center for Global Environmental Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

    Hideo Shiogama

  11. The Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, Ås, Norway

    Sebastian Sippel

  12. Institute of Occupational Medicine, Edinburgh, UK

    Sotiris Vardoulakis

  13. European Centre for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter Medical School, Truro, UK

    Sotiris Vardoulakis

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Correspondence to Daniel Mitchell.

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Mitchell, D., Heaviside, C., Schaller, N. et al. Extreme heat-related mortality avoided under Paris Agreement goals. Nature Clim Change 8, 551–553 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0210-1

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