Examples of impacts cited ranged from famine deaths triggered by droughts and the increased spread of diseases in a warming world, to worsening heavy metal contamination in lakes after wild fires and a poor Russian wheat harvest amid heatwaves in 2010 that led to a doubling of world prices for the commodity.

The tendency towards more extreme weather includes accelerated evaporation rates as temperatures rise, worsening droughts and contributing to more severe wildfires – a combination currently being played out in California, Professor Mora said.

Similarly, with the atmosphere holding about 7 per cent more moisture for each degree of warming, the potential for more intense rain events increases.

About 20-40 per cent of the rainfall from the record wet Hurricane Harvey that soaked Houston in 2017 has been attributed to climate change, Professor Mora said.

Loading

Coastal regions were already being exposed to overlapping hazards from both the land and the ocean, making them particularly vulnerable locations now and in the future.

If carbon emissions continued to rise unabated at their current rate, tropical coastal areas such as in Southeast Asia could face as many as six climate hazards concurrently, the paper said.

These included rising sea level and the increased acidity of oceans as they absorb more carbon from the atmosphere.

Top-down limitations

While societies often relied on top-down approaches to dealing with emissions, the result was often a fragile policy set-up.

"One person can come along and reverse the whole thing," Professor Mora said.

"We need to build the solution for climate change from the bottom up," he said, citing a project currently being tested in Hawaii to make the US state fully carbon neutral by tree planting and other efforts.