Poor countries to bear brunt of climate change despite emitting least CO2

Many of the world’s poorest countries are expected to experience daily heat extremes due to climate change sooner than wealthier nations, according to research from an international team including the University of East Anglia.

New findings published this week in Environmental Research Letters show that the poorest fifth of the global population will be the first to experience more frequent heat extremes, despite cumulatively emitting the least amounts of CO2.

Countries including those in the Horn of Africa and West Africa are likely to be worst affected. The study is the first to examine the link between cumulative CO2 emissions and more frequent hot days.

Manoj Joshi from UEA’s school of environmental sciences said: “Many of the poorest people in the world live in tropical latitudes, while many of the world’s wealthiest people live in mid-latitude climates.

“We know that low latitude regions have much less variability in day-to-day temperatures when compared with the mid-latitudes, which means the ‘signal’ of climate change emerges quite quickly, and because of this, the frequency of extreme hot days increases rapidly too.”

Lead author Luke Harrington, a PhD student at the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (NZCCRI), said: “Previous studies have shown a link between rising global temperatures and increases in the frequency of local heat extremes, while others have shown a clear relationship between the total amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere and rising temperatures.

“This study is the first to use climate models to simulate the end-to-end link between cumulative CO2 emissions and people experiencing more frequent hot days.”