Future cooling gap in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

Andrijevic, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0199-1988 (2020). Future cooling gap in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. IIASA YSSP Report. Laxenburg, Austria: IIASA

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Abstract

Lack of access to cooling is and will become an even more prominent challenge to climate change adaptation as heat stress continues to rise. Here we analyze the socio-economic dimensions of adaptive capacity to deal with heat stress, and find that income, urbanization and inequality are factors that correlate with adaptation against heat stress. Using the scenario space of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, we estimate future trajectories of the cooling gap, which measures the difference between the population exposed to heat stress and population with access to a cooling device. Depending on the scenario, total population affected by the cooling gap could vary between 3.7 to 1.4 billion people in 2050, and between 0.1 and 4.8 billion at the end of the century. Our analysis shows vast regional inequalities in the capacity to adapt to one of the most common manifestations of climate change and underscores the need for considering the temporal evolution of adaptive capacity in assessments of climate change impacts.

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