Water Risk as World Warms

Although many researchers had modeled various aspects of global warming, there had been no comprehensive assessment of what warming will really mean for human societies and vital natural resources.

But that changed last year when Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and other leading climate-impact researchers launched the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project.  This aims to produce a set of harmonized global-impact reports based on the same set of climate data, which will for the first time allow models to be directly compared.  Last month it published its initial results in four reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  These suggest that even modest climate change might drastically affect the living conditions of billions of people, whether through water scarcity, crop shortages, or extremes of weather.

The group warns that water is the biggest worry.  If the world warms by just 2°C above the present level, which now seems all but unavoidable by 2100, up to one-fifth of the global population could suffer severe shortages.

Water Risk as World Warms