Linking Emissions from Fossil Fuel Megaprojects to Lifetime Climate Extremes Across Generations and Multi-Century Committed Change

Carbon bombs comprise 425 fossil fuel megaprojects whose cumulative potential emissions exceed by at least a factor of two the remaining global carbon budget compatible with the Paris Agreement. The full exploitation of these projects would therefore generate substantial additional warming. As high-impact climate extremes intensify with each increment of warming, a central challenge is to quantify how emissions from individual projects translate into concrete physical and societal impacts across current and future generations. 

Within the Source2Suffering project, we develop a modelling framework that links project-level CO₂ and CH₄ emissions to lifetime exposure to six categories of high-impact climate extremes, including heatwaves, droughts, and floods, using a storyline-based approach. The framework also quantifies each project’s contribution to committed glacier mass loss and multi-century sea-level rise. By explicitly representing uncertainties, it provides probabilistic estimates of how warming increments induced by individual fossil fuel projects propagate through physical processes to generate compound and cascading risks. 

The results reveal marked spatial and intergenerational inequalities in exposure. These arise from (i) physical mechanisms that amplify extreme hazards in many regions of the Global South, and (ii) demographic trends that concentrate most of the world’s present and future population in these highly affected areas. By establishing a tractable link between specific emission sources, the physical drivers of high-impact extremes, and their long-term societal consequences, this framework contributes to the development of scientifically grounded information to support climate mitigation efforts.