Quantification of the benefit of global climate change policy for avoiding some of the effect of climate change on heat-related mortality

In order to avoid ‘dangerous' climate change, countries participating in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) international negotiations have agreed that global-mean warming should be limited to 2°C. Information on the potential impacts that climate change could have for different amounts of global-mean warming is therefore of considerable importance to policy-makers. Furthermore, the impacts associated with different climate change mitigation policies relative to “business-as-usual” scenarios can be used to better-inform the decision-making process. This presentation explores, for six cities (Boston, Budapest, Dallas, Lisbon, London and Sydney), what the heat-related mortality rate attributable to climate change could be under a business as usual scenario, as well as under a set of defined climate change mitigation policy scenarios, including an aggressive mitigation scenario that gives a 50% chance of avoiding a 2°C global-mean temperature rise. Climate change projections from 21 climate models are applied, to provide a more rigorous consideration of climate change uncertainty than ever before.