Study: 8.3 crore deaths predicted due to global warming in next 80 years

Columbia University’s Earth Institute has launched a new metric for governments and organizations to calculate the consequences of carbon emissions.

This metric predicts how many lives will be lost or saved based on the choices made by individuals, businesses and governments.

“It quantifies the mortality impact of those decisions” by reducing questions down “to a more personal, understandable level’’, writes Bloomberg quoting Daniel Bressler from Columbia University, the brain behind the research.

The apropos research was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.

The model developed by Bressler takes into account only fatalities linked with direct heat deaths that will be caused by current global-warming trajectories.

The figures that the Yale inspired model predicts is shocking because it does not take into account the deaths caused by rising sea levels, flash floods, landslides due to heavy rainfall, etc.

Without taking deaths due to rising levels or flash floods in consideration, the numbers predicted are so high, that it suggests the total number of deaths due to climate change could be a lot higher than the Columbia model predicted. 

Bressler remarked that the number of deaths in comparison to the lives lost in the Second World War could still be a “vast underestimate”.

Highest deaths predicted in the poorest regions

The new study also reveals that the highest number of fatalities can be expected in Earth’s hottest and poorest regions – Africa, Middle East, South Asia.

In this year alone, humans’ witnesses some of the most devastating effects of climate change across the world.

Many of those consequences meant, the global community was now facing two challenges – the covid-19 pandemic, as well as the extreme consequences of climate change.

Rising sea levels, and frequent flash floods are occurrences that rarely result in high mortality rates in the first world nations.

This month's catastrophic flash floods in Germany means that even the developed nations are now paying the price of increased global carbon emissions.

The country in Europe alone reported above 180 deaths, shocking politicians and leaders, importantly, bringing the climate talks to the forefront again.

Experts remarked that the floods were the result of “two months of rainfall in the space of two days,” wrote the Guardian citing World Meteorological Organization spokesperson Clare Nullis.

Not just Europe, the US also reported as of July 26, 2021, a total of 5,566 fires that burned 458,429 acres of forest land in California.