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RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)
Contents Vol 28(4)

Extreme events in the context of climate change

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick A B * and Andy Pitman A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, Australia

B Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, UNSW Sydney

* Correspondence to: sarah.kirkpatrick@unsw.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 28, e2841825 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp2841825
Published: 6 December 2018

Abstract

By definition, extreme events are rare. Socio-economic and human systems have not experienced adverse extreme events frequently enough to develop resilience, whether this be physical, economical or structural. Humans are vulnerable to extreme events because of our physiology and because we build thresholds into our socio-economic and human health systems. When these thresholds are exceeded the consequences can be devastating. This perspective will discuss changes in heat, drought and heavy rainfall extremes in the context of climate change.

2018 © Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Pitman. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.