Adjusting carbon emissions to the Paris climate commitments would prevent thousands of heat-related deaths

Thousands of annual heat-related deaths could be potentially avoided in major US cities if global temperatures are limited to the Paris Climate Goals compared with current climate commitments, a new study led by the University of Bristol has found. The research, published today in the journal Science Advances , is highly relevant to decisions about strengthening national climate actions in 2020, when the next round of climate pledges is due in 2020. The Paris Agreement aims at keeping global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with an ambition of limiting warming to 1.5°C. Nations in the agreement are required to submit their climate pledges every five years. Climate scientists and epidemiologists from the UK and the US combined observed temperature and mortality data with climate projections of different warmer worlds, to estimate changes in the number of heat-related deaths for 15 major US cities. Their findings showed that limiting warming to the lower Paris Climate Goal could avoid 110 to 2,720 annual heat-related deaths during extreme heat-events, depending on the city. This is substantially more beneficial than limiting warming to the upper Paris Climate Goal, which could avoid 70 to 1,980 deaths per city.