Seasonal cycles enhance disparities between low- and high-income countries in exposure to monthly temperature emergence with future warming

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Harrington, Luke James, Frame, David J., Hawkins, Ed and Joshi, Manoj ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2948-2811 (2017) Seasonal cycles enhance disparities between low- and high-income countries in exposure to monthly temperature emergence with future warming. Environmental Research Letters, 12 (11). ISSN 1748-9326

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Abstract

A common proxy for the adaptive capacity of a community to the impacts of future climate change is the range of climate variability which they have experienced in the recent past. This study presents an interpretation of such a framework for monthly temperatures. Our results demonstrate that emergence into genuinely 'unfamiliar' climates will occur across nearly all months of the year for low-income nations by the second half of the 21st Century under an RCP8.5 warming scenario. However, high income countries commonly experience a large seasonal cycle, owing to their position in the middle latitudes: as a consequence, temperature emergence for transitional months translates only to more-frequent occurrences of heat historically associated with the summertime. Projections beyond 2050 also show low-income countries will experience 2-10 months per year warmer than the hottest month experienced in recent memory, while high-income countries will witness between 1-4 months per year hotter than any month previously experienced. While both results represent significant departures that may bring substantive societal impacts if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, they also demonstrate that spatial patterns of emergence will compound existing differences between high and low income populations, in terms of their capacity to adapt to unprecedented future temperatures.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: sdg 13 - climate action ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/climate_action
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia > Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
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Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 26 Oct 2017 05:05
Last Modified: 22 Oct 2022 03:17
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65262
DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa95ae

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