Centers and Institutes
Published March 1, 2019 | Version v1
Journal article Open

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

Creators

  • 1. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
  • 2. University of Nottingham
  • 3. East China Normal University
  • 4. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement
  • 5. University of Chicago
  • 6. Université de Liège
  • 7. Universidad Pablo de Olavide
  • 8. Dalhousie University
  • 9. ETH Zurich
  • 10. Wageningen University
  • 11. Justus Liebig University Giessen
  • 12. Université du Québec à Montréal
  • 13. Institute of Marine Sciences
  • 14. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research
  • 15. Wageningen Environmental Research

Description

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.

Notes

Due to the large number of authors, only the first 20 and the University of Chicago authors are included on the above author list. Please download the article for the complete list of authors.

Data availability

Data processing scripts are available from the corresponding author upon request. Availability of impact model code varies by model and is indicated in Supplementary Table 1.

Simulation data from gridded impact models is available through https://esg.pik-potsdam.de/projects/isimip2a/ and citable using the following DOIs: https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2017.002 (terrestrial ecosystems); https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2017.006 (agriculture); https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2017.010 (hydrology); https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2018.004 (marine ecosystems, regional); https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2018.005 (marine ecosystems, global). The city-level mortality model data and country-level hydropower model data are available from the authors upon request.

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s41467-019-08745-6.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1038/s41467-019-08745-6
Other
oai:uchicago.tind.io:14792

Funding

Leibniz Competition
SAW-2013-PIK-5
European Union
FP7–603864–2
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
01LS1201A1
JSPS
16H06291

UChicago Information

Division(s)
Institutes & Centers, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering
Center(s) or Institute(s)
Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy