2. Climate change impacts I

Key climate impacts and indirect impacts

In this lecture, we cover the main impacts of climate change. On a given territory, climate change can have basically two types of impacts:

  • Direct impacts, such as floods, heat waves etc. These impact directly affect the territory
  • Indirect impacts, i.e. impacts which indirectly affect a territory via trade, the movements of population etc. They include population migrations, the risk of war, the destabilization of food markets etc.

Both direct and indirect impacts can affect cities, but the adaptation strategies are completely different.

Download the slides here. Download the slides presented on class here.

Required reading

The Uninhabitable Earth (2017) a famous newspaper article describing in great details potential impacts of climate change on earth in unabated GHG emission scenarios. NB: If you are interested, it was later developed into a book.

Foreword

Key Impacts

If you want to know more

Ecosystems and biodiversity

The reference document on this question

Agriculture and food security

Some reference documents on these questions

War and migrations

References cited in the video

  • Xu, C., Kohler, T.A., Lenton, T.M., Svenning, J.-C., Scheffer, M., 2020. Future of the human climate niche. PNAS 117, 11350–11355. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
  • Mach, K.J., Kraan, C.M., Adger, W.N., Buhaug, H., Burke, M., Fearon, J.D., Field, C.B., Hendrix, C.S., Maystadt, J.-F., O’Loughlin, J., Roessler, P., Scheffran, J., Schultz, K.A., Uexkull, N. von, 2019. Climate as a risk factor for armed conflict. Nature 571, 193–197. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1300-6

General references

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