Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes

Under continued global warming, extreme events such as heatwaves will continue to rise in frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent over the next decades. Younger generations are therefore expected to face more such events across their lifetimes compared to older generations. This raises important questions about solidarity and fairness across generations that have fueled a surge of climate protests led by young people in recent years, and that underpin questions of intergenerational equity raised in recent climate litigation. However, the standard scientific paradigm is to assess climate change in discrete time windows or at discrete levels of warming, a “period” approach that inhibits quantification of how much more extreme events a particular generation will experience over its lifetime compared to another. By developing a “cohort” perspective to quantify changes in lifetime exposure to climate extremes and compare across generations, we estimate that children born in 2020 will experience a two to sevenfold increase in extreme events, particularly heatwaves, under current climate policy pledges. Our results highlight a severe threat to the safety of young generations and call for drastic emission reductions to safeguard their future.

 

Thiery, W., Lange, S., Rogelj, J., Schleussner, C.-F., Gudmundsson, L., Seneviratne, S.I., Frieler, K., Emanuel, K., Geiger, T., Bresch, D.N., Zhao, F., Willner, S.N., Büchner, M., Volkholz, J., Andrijevic, M., Bauer, N., Chang, J., Ciais, P., Dury, M., François, L., Grillakis, M., Gosling, S.N., Hanasaki, N., Hickler, T., Huber, V., Ito, A., Jägermeyr, J., Khabarov, N., Koutroulis, A., Liu, W., Lutz, W., Mengel, M., Müller, C., Ostberg, S., Reyer, C.P.O., Stacke, T., Wada, Y., 2021, Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes, Science, 374(6564), 158-160.