Past and Projected Climate Extremes Impacts on Human Development

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme events and hazards, posing serious risks to societies and ecosystems worldwide. These phenomena do not only threaten economic systems but also broader dimensions of human well-being, including inequality, health, and education. Despite a growing recognition of these risks, the global mechanisms linking climate extremes to human development remain poorly understood. Furthermore, besides GDP, explicit estimation of future climate change damages and extremes on socio-economic projections remain limited. 

In this study, we focus on the impacts of climate extremes on human development, analyzing their effects on three main components of the Human Development Index (HDI): life expectancy, expected years of schooling, and gross national income per capita. Using a dataset covering 1,773 sub-national regions over three decades from 1990 to 2020, we employ high-resolution climate data to examine immediate and lagged socio-economic responses to extreme events and hazards, particularly rainfall extremes, heatwaves, and droughts. By exploiting fixed effects panel modeling, our approach accounts for the simultaneous inclusion of multiple extremes in damage functions and evaluates the integration of an adaptation proxy to capture regional differences in vulnerability.

Finally, we apply the derived impact functions to Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios, providing projections of climate-driven damages on HDI across different development and climatic narratives, capturing the key climatic and social uncertainties.