Researchers at Canada’s McGill University have developed a global index on how climate change will impact humans, based on similar models that show how plants and animals respond to climate change. According to the study, published by the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, people living in hot, low-latitude countries are the most likely to feel the impact over the next few decades. The study reinforces the conclusion that countries that produce the least carbon dioxide emissions per-capita are the ones that are the most vulnerable to climate change.
“Strongly negative impacts of climate change are predicted in Central America, central South America, the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and much of Africa. Importantly, the regions of greatest vulnerability are generally distant from the high-latitude regions where the magnitude of climate change will be greatest. Furthermore, populations contributing the most to greenhouse gas emissions on a per capita basis are unlikely to experience the worst impacts of climate change, satisfying the conditions for a moral hazard in climate change policies.”
The broad-picture model combines climate data with census data of the world’s populations to correlate both changes through 2050.
