Combining socio-economic and climate projections to assess heat risk

Armand Landreau,Alexandra Jurgilevich,Aleksi Räsänen,Sirkku Juhola

doi:10.1007/s10584-021-03148-3

Abstract

The assessments of future climate risks are common; however, usually, they focus on climate projections without considering social changes. We project heat risks for Finland to evaluate (1) what kind of differences there are in heat vulnerability projections with different scenarios and scales, and (2) how the use of socio-economic scenarios influences heat risk assessments. We project a vulnerability index with seven indicators downscaled to the postal code area scale for 2050. Three different scenario sets for vulnerability are tested: one with five global Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios; the second with three European SSPs (EUSSPs) with data at the sub-national scale (NUTS2); and the last with the EUSSPs but aggregated data at the national scale. We construct projections of heat risk utilizing climatic heat hazard data for three different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and vulnerability and exposure data for five global SSPs up to 2100. In the vulnerability projections, each scenario in each dataset shows a decrease in vulnerability compared to current values, and the differences between the three scenario sets are small. There are evident differences both in the spatial patterns and in the temporal trends when comparing the risk projections with constant vulnerability to the projections with dynamic vulnerability. Heat hazard increases notably in RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, but a decrease of vulnerability especially in SSP1 and SSP5 alleviates risks. We show that projections of vulnerability have a considerable impact on future heat-related risk and emphasize that future risk assessments should include the combination of long-term climatic and socio-economic projections.

Highlights

It has been estimated that the 2003 summer heatwave in Europe caused 70,000 excess deaths (Robine et al 2008)
We compared two sets of socio-economic scenarios: five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), the narratives of which have been described on a global scale, and three extended SSPs, the narratives of which have been specified for the European Union
Both the SSP and the European SSPs (EUSSPs) vulnerability projections for 2050 show a decrease in vulnerability in all scenarios compared to the current situation (Fig. 2)

Summary

Introduction

It has been estimated that the 2003 summer heatwave in Europe caused 70,000 excess deaths (Robine et al 2008). In addition to increased mortality, heat causes a wide range of direct adverse impacts on human health, including impacts on cardio-vascular (Sohail et al 2020), mental (Palinkas and Wong 2020), occupational (Kjellstrom et al 2016), and maternal (Kuehn and McCormick 2017) health. Risk is a function of a climate hazard (i.e. in our study heat), exposure (the presence of an object at risk in places and settings that could be adversely affected; IPCC 2014), and vulnerability It has been shown that socio-economic (i.e. vulnerability and exposure) factors are important drivers of heat risk and can be even more important than hazard (Chen et al 2018; Rohat et al 2019b). Relevant socio-economic factors include, e.g., gender, childhood, old age, low income, low education level, social isolation, and health status (Reckien et al 2017; Räsänen et al 2019; Rohat et al 2019a, 2019b)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion