Demographic Differential Vulnerability to Extreme Climate Change (HELIX)

With the target of limiting global warming to 2ºC becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, policymakers, businesses and other decision-makers need to begin to plan ahead for adaptation to changes in climate associated with higher levels of global warming. Alongside this, ongoing international negotiations on limiting global warming require clear information on the demographic consequences of different levels of climate change. The HELIX project (High-End cLimate Impacts and eXtremes), and FP7 funded by the European Commission, will address this by providing a clear, coherent, internally consistent view of a manageable number of “future worlds” under higher levels of global warming reached under a range of physical and socio-economic circumstances. This paper outlines the overarching framework of the HELIX project, its objectives, and, more specifically, its intended task of examining the potential implications of climate change for migration and conflict, including the implications of socio-economic scenarios, particularly their effects on vulnerability and adaptation constraints. The paper focuses in particular on the way that demographic differentials will affect people’s behavior in the face of extreme climate change. The perspective on the impacts of climate change on populations is usually rooted in a deterministic perspective that does not account for the role of demographic differentials in variability assessment, yet demographic research shows that such differentials are a key determinant of vulnerability to environmental stress.