What near-term climate impacts should worry us most?
This research paper – drawing on insights from 200 experts – highlights that, within the current decade, climate hazards are expected to have increasingly serious disruptive impacts. While many hazards may now be inevitable, action on adaptation has the potential to limit the worst expected climate impacts, at regional and global levels. The 10 hazard-impact pathways of greatest near-term concern all relate to regions of Africa and Asia. The impacts of greatest concern – food security and migration and displacement of people – may arise from hazards such as drought, changing rainfall patterns or heatwaves. Impacts will be greatest where communities are already most vulnerable, but will also set off interacting, compounding cascades of secondary impacts that cross borders and continents.
The paper highlights that even within the next decade, climate hazards are expected to have increasingly significant disruptive impacts. These impacts will not just play out locally in the path of the climate hazard, but form part of complex, interacting, cascading and compounding hazard-impact pathways which will create global impacts. The impacts of greatest concern are food security, migration and displacement of people, and conflict in Africa. These arise from multiple climate hazards: drought and changing rainfall patterns, coupled with heatwaves. East Africa and the Sahel, spanning West and East Africa, are identified as being of particular concern. Food security concerns are not, however, confined to the African continent. Similar climate hazards, inclusive of flooding, were seen by the participating experts to be likely to impact South and Southeast Asia, and Australasia. Migration and displacement of people, stemming from similar climate hazards, were also of great concern to the participating experts. To reduce the likelihood of climate hazards materializing into impacts within vulnerable countries over the next decade, as well as minimize the chances of cascading impacts stemming from these countries, the international community, the governments of wealthy countries, investors, business leaders and academics need to work with vulnerable countries.