Infrastructure built to protect cities from flooding can increase economic damages elsewhere.
Image credit: Michelle A. Hummel.
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Edited by Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved December 4, 2009 (received for review September 10, 2009)
Abstract
When will least developed countries be most vulnerable to climate change, given the influence of projected socio-economic development? The question is important, not least because current levels of international assistance to support adaptation lag more than an order of magnitude below what analysts estimate to be needed, and scaling up support could take many years. In this paper, we examine this question using an empirically derived model of human losses to climate-related extreme events, as an indicator of vulnerability and the need for adaptation assistance. We develop a set of 50-year scenarios for these losses in one country, Mozambique, using high-resolution climate projections, and then extend the results to a sample of 23 least-developed countries. Our approach takes into account both potential changes in countries’ exposure to climatic extreme events, and socio-economic development trends that influence countries’ own adaptive capacities. Our results suggest that the effects of socio-economic development trends may begin to offset rising climate exposure in the second quarter of the century, and that it is in the period between now and then that vulnerability will rise most quickly. This implies an urgency to the need for international assistance to finance adaptation.
Footnotes
- ↵ 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: patt{at}iiasa.ac.at.
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Author contributions: A.G.P. designed research; A.G.P., M.T., P.N., K.A., M.M., J.R., A.G., and G.B. performed research; A.G.P., M.T., P.N., K.A., A.G., and G.B. analyzed data; and A.G.P. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0910253107/DCSupplemental.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
Estimating least-developed countries’ vulnerability to climate-related extreme events over the next 50 years
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- Social Sciences
- Sustainability Science
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