Citation

Shindell D, Zhang Y, Scott M, Ru M, Stark K, Ebi KL. Geohealth 2020; 4(4): e2019GH000234.

Affiliation

Center for Health and the Global Environment University of Washington Seattle WA USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, American Geophysical Union, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1029/2019GH000234

PMID

32258942

PMCID

PMC7125937

Abstract

Exposure to high ambient temperatures is an important cause of avoidable, premature death that may become more prevalent under climate change. Though extensive epidemiological data are available in the United States, they are largely limited to select large cities, and hence, most projections estimate the potential impact of future warming on a subset of the U.S. population. Here we utilize evaluations of the relative risk of premature death associated with temperature in 10 U.S. cities spanning a wide range of climate conditions to develop a generalized risk function. We first evaluate the performance of this generalized function, which introduces substantial biases at the individual city level but performs well at the large scale. We then apply this function to estimate the impacts of projected climate change on heat-related nationwide U.S. deaths under a range of scenarios. During the current decade, there are 12,000 (95% confidence interval 7,400-16,500) premature deaths annually in the contiguous United States, much larger than most estimates based on totals for select individual cities. These values increase by 97,000 (60,000-134,000) under the high-warming Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario and by 36,000 (22,000-50,000) under the moderate RCP4.5 scenario by 2100, whereas they remain statistically unchanged under the aggressive mitigation scenario RCP2.6. These results include estimates of adaptation that reduce impacts by ~40-45% as well as population increases that roughly offset adaptation. The results suggest that the degree of climate change mitigation will have important health impacts on Americans.

©2020. The Authors.

Language: en

Keywords

climate change; heat exposure; heat‐related mortality