@article {600, title = {Multisectoral climate impact hotspots in a warming world}, volume = {111}, year = {2014}, month = {03/2014}, pages = {3233-3238}, abstract = {
The impacts of global climate change on different aspects of humanity{\textquoteright}s diverse life-support systems are complex and often difficult to predict. To facilitate policy decisions on mitigation and adaptation strategies, it is necessary to understand, quantify, and synthesize these climate-change impacts, taking into account their uncertainties. Crucial to these decisions is an understanding of how impacts in different sectors overlap, as overlapping impacts increase exposure, lead to interactions of impacts, and are likely to raise adaptation pressure. As a first step we develop herein a framework to study coinciding impacts and identify regional exposure hotspots. This framework can then be used as a starting point for regional case studies on vulnerability and multifaceted adaptation strategies. We consider impacts related to water, agriculture, ecosystems, and malaria at different levels of global warming. Multisectoral overlap starts to be seen robustly at a mean global warming of 3 {\textdegree}C above the 1980{\textendash}2010 mean, with 11\% of the world population subject to severe impacts in at least two of the four impact sectors at 4 {\textdegree}C. Despite these general conclusions, we find that uncertainty arising from the impact models is considerable, and larger than that from the climate models. In a low probability-high impact worst-case assessment, almost the whole inhabited world is at risk for multisectoral pressures. Hence, there is a pressing need for an increased research effort to develop a more comprehensive understanding of impacts, as well as for the development of policy measures under existing uncertainty.
}, keywords = {Coinciding pressures, Differential climate impacts, ISI-MIP}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.1222471110}, author = {Franziska Piontek and Christoph M{\"u}ller and Thomas A M Pugh and Douglas B Clark and Delphine Deryng and Joshua Elliott and Felipe de Jesus Col{\'o}n Gonz{\'a}lez and Martina Fl{\"o}rke and Christian Folberth and Wietse Franssen and Katja Frieler and Andrew D Friend and Simon N Gosling and Deborah Hemming and NIkolay Khabarov and Hyungjun Kim and Mark R Lomas and Yoshimitsu Masaki and Matthias Mengel and Andrew Morse and Kathleen Neumann and Kazuya Nishina and Sebastian Ostberg and Ryan Pavlick and Alex C Ruane and Jacob Schewe and Erwin Schmid and Tobias Stacke and Qiuhong Tang and Zachary D Tessler and Adrian M Tompkins and Lila Warszawski and Dominik Wisser and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber} }