London: Rising temperature across the globe will drive billions of people out of the ‘climate niche’ in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented high temperatures and extreme weather, according to a media report.
The report stated that the world is on track for 2.70 Celsius of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 290 Celsius by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past.
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The report indicated that around 1 billion people might chose to migrate to cooler places, although those areas remaining within the climate niche would still experience more frequent heatwaves and droughts.
“Urgent steps to cut down carbon emissions could keep global temperature rise to 1.50C, which would cut the number of people pushed outside the climate niche by 80%, to 400 million,” the report said, adding that the analysis is the first of its kind and is able to treat every citizen equally, unlike previous economic assessments of the damage of the climate crisis, which have been skewed towards the rich.
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Although the idea of climate niches for wild animals and plants is well established, the new study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, identified the climate conditions in which human societies have thrived.
The study finds that most people lived in places with mean annual temperatures spread around 130C or 250C. Conditions outside those are too hot, too cold or too dry and associated with higher death rates, lower food production and lower economic growth, the report said.
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Professor Chi Xu at Nanjing University in China, and also part of the research team, said: “Such high temperatures (outside the niche) have been linked to issues including increased mortality, decreased labour productivity, decreased cognitive performance, impaired learning, adverse pregnancy outcomes, decreased crop yield, increased conflict and infectious disease spread.”
