Just over half of the children born in 2020 will face unprecedented exposure to heatwaves over their lifetime ' even under a conservative projection for how climate change will unfold over the next 75 years. The findings, published in Nature on 7 May1, highlight the disproportionate burden that climate change places on today's young people ' and the need to limit global warming to safeguard future generations. 'Many people of my age have children, young children, and it's especially for those that the projections look very dire,' says study co-author Wim Thiery, a climate scientist at Vrije University in Brussels, who was born in 1987. That children and young people will bear the brunt of the climate-change burden is not a new idea. But the latest study is among the first to pinpoint the generations and numbers of people that will experience an 'unprecedented life' in terms of extreme heat (see 'Children facing extreme heat'), says Thiery. The researchers define this as a threshold...
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