RISE lecture series

4 octobre (11h30) | Tim Lenton
Points de bascule positifs pour éviter les points de bascule climatiques

Tipping points in climate science normally refer to small changes in the Earth system that unleash much broader, typically damaging impacts that accelerate climate change. Well-known examples are rising sea levels due to disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets, or the release of methane from the thawing permafrost. They help to underline the urgency of climate action. Today most people understand we must reduce emissions – and very quickly.

In this webinar, Tim will summarise recent evidence regarding climate tipping points, which supports declarations that we are in a ‘climate emergency’. Then he will turn to identifying positive social tipping points that will need to be triggered to have any hope of limiting global warming to well below 2C.

October 11 (11:30) | Huiqi Chen

Assessing the Health and Economic Burden of Heat Stress under Climate Change: Case Studies from China and Brazil

Climate change has a huge impact on global health, with high temperatures being the most direct and significant influencing factor. However, current research on the impact of heat on health is mainly focused on a short-term assessment of mortality or admissions in a given country region. This offers an incomplete picture of the overall impact of heat on national health systems in the longer term, especially economic implications. This lecture aims to assess the economic impact of heat stress on health systems using China and Brazil as case studies, exploring how effects vary over time and across subnational regions.

Based on gridded temperature datasets and municipality-scale health datasets, the relationships between heat stress and the risk of health outcomes are constructed using time-series analysis. The attributable risk assessment method is employed to estimate heat-attributable mortality or morbidity. Furthermore, the economic burden of health impacts is calculated using the willingness-to-pay or cost-of-illness approaches.

The findings indicate that with accelerating climate change and population ageing, the effects of future heat stress on human health are likely to increase continuously even under a low emission scenario. However, pursuing a sustainable development pathway significantly reduces both health impacts and associated economic burdens. Policymakers need to tighten climate mitigation policies tailored to local conditions while enhancing climate resilience technically and infrastructurally, especially for vulnerable people.