Climate change threatens almost 55 million people in India’s coastal areas and could lock in enough sea level rise to submerge land now home to more than half a billion people globally if the temperature spikes by 4 degrees Celsius – humanity’s current trajectory.
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The findings come just weeks ahead of a United Nations climate summit in Paris, from November 30 to December 11.
Climate Central’s data is based on peer-reviewed research published in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and illustrates the long-term effects carbon emissions can have on locking in sea-level rise over hundreds of years.
“The global stakes of climate change are crystal clear with sea level rise”, said Ben Strauss, a coauthor of the report and vice president for climate impacts at Climate Central, in a press release.
At 3 degrees, median sea-level rise of 6.4 metres (21 feet) would affect a few 432 million people living below that level, the Climate Central report said.
The report warned that a 4 degrees Celsius increase in temperature could submerge 145 million in China, according to global Business Times. Mumbai has 11 million people at risk after 4°C of warming; the number drops to 5.8 million in case of 2°C warming.
Climate Central offers an online mapping platform into which users can type a coastal city name or postal code worldwide, and compare the potential local consequences of different warming or emissions scenarios.
Another 12 nations were found to have more than 10 million people at risk from rising seas, led by India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
According to the report, China – the world’s leading carbon emitter – also leads in coastal risk, with 145 million people living on land ultimately threatened by rising seas if emission levels are not reduced.
“Sea-level rise is nothing to be afraid of, because it is slow, but it is something to be anxious about, because it is consuming our land, including the cities in which we create our future heritage today”, said Anders Levermann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Outside of Asia, the most threatened nation is the United States with roughly 25 million people on implicated land, reported the Wire.
Although they are not home to almost the number of people as cities such as Mumbai or Hanoi, small island countries such as Kiribati, the Maldives and the Solomon Islands are facing an existential risk from sea level rise, and not in the distant future, either.
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However, if warming were limited to 2 degrees Celsius, Kiribati and the Maldives would cut their populations at risk by 48 and 42 percentage points, the study found.
