Millions at risk

Agreements to mitigate climate change have been hampered by several things, not least their cost. But the cost might well be more acceptable if we had a clear picture of what damages would be avoided by different levels of emissions reductions, in other words a clear idea of the pay-off. The authors have been researching impacts in key areas of risk: hunger, water shortage, exposure to malaria transmission, and coastal flooding, as part of a global fast-track assessment. For this review they graphed their estimates of effects as a single measure: the additional millions of people who could be placed at risk as a result of different amounts of global warming.