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

Schewe, Jacob and Gosling,, Simon N. and Reyer, Christopher and Zhao,, Fang and Ciais, Philippe and Elliott, Joshua and Francois, Louis and Huber, Veronika and Lotze, Heike K. and Seneviratne,, Sonia I. and van Vliet, Michelle T. H. and Vautard,, Robert and Wada, Yoshihide and Breuer, Lutz and Büchner, Matthias and Carozza, David A. and Chang, Jinfeng and Coll, Marta and Deryng, Delphine and de Wit, Allard and Eddy, Tyler and Folberth, Christian and Frieler, Katja and Friend,, Andrew D. and Gerten,, Dieter and Gudmundsson, Lukas and Hanasaki, Naota and Ito, Akihiko and Khabarov, Nikolay and Kim, Hyungjun and Lawrence, Peter and Morfopoulos, Catherine and Müller, Christoph and Müller Schmied, Hannes and Orth,, René and Ostberg, Sebastian and Pokhrel, Yadu and Pugh, Thomas A. M. and Sakurai, Gen and Satoh, Yusuke and Schmid,, Erwin and Stacke, Tobias and Steenbeek, Jeroen and Steinkamp, Jörg and Tang, Qiuhong and Tian, Hanqin and Tittensor, Derek P. and Volkholz,, Jan and Wang, Xuhui and Warszawski, Lila (2019) State-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes. Nature Communications, 10 (1005). ISSN 2041-1723

[English] PDF Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (2MB)

Abstract

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.

Actions (login required)

View Item