IBM's Sustainability Accelerator ProgramLatinX have high participation in weather-exposed industries, such as construction and agriculture, which are especially vulnerable to extreme temperatures. With that same two °C temperature increase due to global warming, LatinX individuals are 43% more likely to currently live in areas with the highest projected decrease in labor hours due to extreme temperatures.
Globally, disasters related to weather, climate or water hazard caused 2 million deaths and US$ 3.64 trillion in losses between the 1970s and 2019. Research published in 2021 in the Journal Nature Climate Change used machine learning to analyze and map more than 100,000 studies of events that could be linked to global warming. Researchers paired the analysis with a well-established data set of temperature and precipitation shifts caused by fossil fuel use and other sources of carbon emissions. Aside from the critical finding that despite existing pledges, the planet is on track to heat up about 2.7 degrees Celsius (4.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the researchers identified an immense gap in studies. For example, fewer than 10,000 studies looked at climate change's effect on Africa, and about half as many focused on South America. By contrast, roughly 30,000 published papers examined climate impacts in North America.
