Projections of Future Changes in U.S. Violent Crime under Global Warming

The link between crime and weather has been a fascination of the fields of criminology and sociology since the mid–nineteenth century. A recent study revealed robust correlations between seasonal climate and violent crime rates at regional scales within the continental United States, begging the question of how future climate change will influence violent crime rates. Here we combine empirical models from previous studies with 42 state-of-the-science global climate models to make such projections, while accounting for key factors like regionality and seasonality, as well as appropriately combining multiple of sources of uncertainty. Our results indicate that the United States should expect an additional 3.6 (2.4) million violent crimes between 2020 and 2099 under a higher (lower) greenhouse gas emissions scenario compared to baseline. We also reveal the critical dependencies of these violent crime projections on meeting various global mean warming targets, such as those associated with the Paris Agreement (i.e., 1.5˚C and 2˚C). These results emphasize the often-overlooked socially-driven impacts of climate change on human health, with an estimated economic cost in the low billions per year.