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Just over half of the children born in 2020 will face unprecedented exposure to heatwaves over their lifetime, even under a conservative projection for how climate change will unfold over the next 75 years.

The figure rises to 92% of today’s five-year-olds if more pessimistic climate predictions come to pass, and compares with just 16% of people born in 1960 under any future climate scenario.

The findings, published in Nature on 7 May, highlight the disproportionate burden that climate change places on today’s young people — and the need to limit global warming to safeguard future generations.

“Many people of my age have children, young children, and it’s especially for those that the projections look very dire,” says study co-author Wim Thiery, a climate scientist at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, who was born in 1987.

That children and young people will bear the brunt of the climate-change burden is not a new idea. But the latest study is among the first to pinpoint the generations and numbers of people that will experience an “unprecedented life” in terms of extreme heat, says Thiery (see ‘Children facing extreme heat’).

They then used demographic data to calculate, for a series of generations born between 1960 and 2020, worldwide, the fraction of each generation that would reach that limit across their lifetimes — and how that would vary with different global-warming scenarios.

Heat on the horizon

The proportion of each generation predicted to experience ‘unprecedented lives’ in terms of heat exposure varied hugely. Of the 81 million people born worldwide in 1960, who are now in their mid-sixties, just 13 million, or 16%, would reach this exposure threshold over their lifetimes, regardless of the climate scenario. But for the 120 million children born in 2020, 58 million (around 50%) would experience this level of exposure, even in the most optimistic scenario put forward by researchers of 1.5 °C of warming above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100. The fraction of today’s five-year-olds experiencing unprecedented lifetime exposure to heatwaves rises to 92% (some 111 million people) for the more pessimistic climate scenario of 3.5 °C of warming.

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