GENEVA - Climate change will have a massive impact on people worldwide and potentially spark a significant expansion of inequalities over the coming years and decades. As an open public good, the Human Climate Horizons allows everyone to see the stark reality of how climate change could impact their lives and communities and helps understand the human consequences of climate change under different scenarios.
Fortunately, our future is not predetermined. Concerted global progress towards Paris Agreement targets could reduce projected mortality from extreme heat in 2100 by more than 80%, potentially saving tens of millions of lives over the next decades.
Human Climate Horizons helps us make better choices about the future we want and empowers everyone with information to play a role in changing the conversation, globally and locally. The new data shows that the world needs to act quickly, not only through efforts to mitigate climate change but also to adapt to its consequences.
For example, in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, under a scenario of very high emissions, an additional 132 people in every 100,000 could die each year by 2100 compared to a future with no climate change. To put this in context, this figure is double Bangladesh’s 2019 death rate from all cancers each year and 9 times greater than the rate of road traffic fatalities.
Similar patterns are seen even in countries better prepared like Japan. Under the same scenario in Tokyo, the effect of climate change on death rates at the end of the century is twice as lethal as kidney disease is in Japan currently.
A comparison of the health impacts of climate change across countries offers an even more extreme picture: a likely intensification of existing inequality with irreversible effects. In Helsinki, Finland, death rates are predicted to fall dramatically but predicted to rise by a similar rate across most of Sudan.
Some countries will also experience greater within-country inequalities because of climate change. In Barranquilla, a port city in northern Colombia for example, under a scenario of very high emissions, an additional 37 people in every 100,000 could die as a result of warmer temperatures each year by 2100. This figure is 5 times greater than Colombia’s death rate from breast cancer each year. While in some of the Colombian cities that have colder winters, like the capital Bogotá, death rates are expected to fall.
Without concerted and urgent action, climate change will exacerbate inequalities and widen gaps in human development, according to the new Human Climate Horizons (HCH) platform launched today by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Climate Impact Lab.
Designed to empower people and decision makers everywhere, the platform allows users to see what climate change could mean for people’s lives using
hyperlocal data from over 24,000 places around the world.
“Focusing on the effect of climate change on issues like mortality, labour and energy use, the new Human Climate Horizons puts vital data and analytics into the hands of policymakers, helping countries to take climate action where it is needed most," says UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner. "For instance, the platform shows that stronger global efforts towards the Paris Agreement’s targets could reduce projected mortality from extreme heat in the year 2100 by more than 80%, saving tens of millions of lives.”
Freely available in the lead up to COP27, the HCH platform opens access to an evolving stream of research to help inform action to reduce the unequal effects of rising global greenhouse gas emissions.
