Luke Grant, Inne Vanderkelen, Lukas Gudmundsson, Erich Fischer, Sonia I. Seneviratne and Wim Thiery (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Environment and Climate Change Canada, KU Leuven, Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium and ETH Zurich); published in Nature (Springer Nature)
Unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes by birth year (Grant et al. 2025)
A modelled projection of how many people born each year from 1960 to 2020 will live through more heatwaves, crop failures, river floods, droughts, wildfires and tropical cyclones in their lifetime than the 99.99th percentile of lifetimes simulated in a pre-industrial climate ("unprecedented lifetime exposure"), along warming pathways that reach 1.5 to 3.5 °C above 1850-1900 by 2100. Extremes come from the ISIMIP2b simulations (four CMIP5 climate models and, for every extreme except heatwaves, impact models), combined with population, cohort sizes and country-average life expectancy. It is a statistical definition of an unusual lifetime, not a count of deaths or of harm.
Numbers published from it
Licence and credit
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- CC BY 4.0
- What the terms say
“Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-12; re-checked automatically every week.
- Credit we give
- Grant, L., Vanderkelen, I., Gudmundsson, L., Fischer, E., Seneviratne, S. I. & Thiery, W. (2025). Global emergence of unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes. Nature 641, 374–379. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08907-1. CC BY 4.0.
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- Cite as
- Grant, L., Vanderkelen, I., Gudmundsson, L. et al. Global emergence of unprecedented lifetime exposure to climate extremes. Nature 641, 374–379 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08907-1
Files
The article's full text as JATS XML from Europe PMC (PMC12058528). The abstract and the Results section "Unprecedented exposure to heatwaves" state the world share of the 1960 and 2020 birth cohorts facing unprecedented lifetime exposure to heatwaves under the 1.5 °C and 3.5 °C pathways.
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/PMC12058528/fullTextXML
Status
- Programme
- Published once (online 7 May 2025; volume 641, issue 8062); no update is planned.
- Updates
- One-off (published 2025)
- Last check
- Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-25T10:12:26Z)