Billions Could Live in Extreme Heat Zones Within Decades, Study Finds

As the climate continues to warm over the next half-century, up to one-third of the world’s population is likely to live in areas that are considered unsuitably hot for humans, scientists said Monday.

A cow skull in Chile in January. By 2070, extreme heat could
encompass larger parts of South America and other regions. 

Currently fewer than 25 million people live in the world’s hottest areas, which are mostly in the Sahara region in Africa with mean annual temperatures above about 84 degrees Fahrenheit, or 29 Celsius. But the researchers said that by 2070 such extreme heat could encompass a much larger part of Africa, as well as parts of India, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia.

With the global population projected to rise to about 10 billion by 2070, that means as many as 3.5 billion people could inhabit those areas. Some of them could migrate to cooler areas, but that would bring economic and societal disruption with it.

The parts of the world that could become unsuitably hot “are precisely the areas that are growing the fastest,” said Timothy A. Kohler, an archaeologist at the University of Washington and an author of the study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read the story from The New York Times by Henry Fountain - “Billions Could Live in Extreme Heat Zones Within Decades, Study Finds.”