Emissions and emergence: a new index comparing relative contributions to climate change with relative climatic consequences

Environmental Research Letters (2019)

We develop a new index which maps relative climate change contributions to relative emergent impacts of climate change.

The index compares cumulative emissions data with patterns of signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) in regional temperature. The latter act as a proxy for a range of local climate impacts, so emergent patterns of this ratio provide an informative way of summarising the regional disparities of climate change impacts. We combine these with measures of regional/national contributions to climate change to develop an ’emissions-emergence index’ (EEI).

The EEI is a simple but robust indicator which captures relative contributions to and regional impacts from climate change.