Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: http://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15871. This is version 4 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Authors

Christopher Lyon , Erin E Saupe, Christopher J Smith, Daniel J Hill, Andrew P Beckerman, Lindsay C Stringer, Robert Marchant, James McKay, Ariane Burke, Paul O'Higgins, Alexander M Dunhill, Bethany Allen , Julien Riel-Salvatore, Tracy Aze

Abstract

Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for prediction. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore shortsighted. Critical problems for food production and climate-forced ‘survival’ migration are projected to arise well before 2100 raising questions regarding the habitability of some regions of the Earth after the turn of the century. To highlight the need for more distant horizon scanning, we model climate change to 2500 under a suite of emission scenarios and quantify associated projections of crop viability and heat stress. Together, our projections show global climate impacts significantly increase after 2100 without rapid mitigation. As a result, projections of climate and its effects on human well-being and associated governance and policy must be framed beyond 2100.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5QG7D

Subjects

Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Keywords

climate change, food security, climate modelling, adaptation, heat stress, mitigation, loss and damage, migration

Dates

Published: 2020-12-17 00:35

Last Updated: 2021-09-11 21:02

Older Versions
License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
None.

Data Availability (Reason not available):
Data will made available after peer-review and acceptance.