The goal of our project is to compile in a systematic manner the evidence in support of the impacts climate hazards on humanity.
To ensure a systematic review, we scrutinized the first 200 references in Google Scholar that resulted from using as keywords each possible combination of ten climate hazards (i.e., warming, heatwaves, precipitation, floods, drought, fires, sea level, storms, natural cover change, ocean climate change) on six aspects of human life (i.e., health, food, water, infrastructure, economy and security). We selected papers that reported impacts on people regardless of whether impacts were positive or negative. Selected papers were read and from them extracted any mention to a human impact from a climate hazard.
An impact was broadly considered as any case example of “an explicit climate hazard causing a response on an explicit aspect of human life in an explicit or implicit place and time.” The criteria allowed us to identify the climate hazard and human aspect that was affected while ensuring the impact was empirically observed. The explicit reference to a climate hazard and human aspect affected allowed us to classify each entry in the table shown in this web-page.
Mentions to impacts that lacked traceable evidence were excluded. For instance, a claim like "increased mortality has been observed during heatwaves" was not considered. This entry lacks the traceable evidence to support such a conclusion; that is, when and where the heatwave that killed people happened. In turn valid entry was: "During the 2003 European heatwave over 70,000 excess human deaths were observed". This later entry provides traceable evidence that an explicit climate hazard (i.e., a heatwave) impacted an explicit aspect of human life (i.e., mortality) in a given place (i.e., Europe) and time (i.e., 2003).
Most entries are actual extracts copied from the papers read. After entering a given impact in the database, this was reviewed and validated by a group of two or three experts to ensure that the given entry met the criteria of an impact.
For quality assurance, the verification of entries and web-page management follows the following protocol:
A person can register and wait for verification by the web-master, who will approve or not the user to enter records of impacts. After acceptance of the user, he/she can enter data, modify his/her own data, but not that of others. Any entry will appear automatically in the list of entries but for display in the main page, it has to go through a secondary process of verification by an expert. Experts will assess if the given entry met the criteria and if the source is reliable. After validation by an expert, the entry will appear in the main page.
To preview the PDFs of the paper you can use "papers" as user and password.