Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Concurrent extreme events exacerbate adverse impacts on humans, economy, and environment relative to those from independent extreme events. However, while the effects of climate change on the frequency of individual extreme events have been highly researched, the impacts of climate change on compound events have not been extensively investigated, particularly in East Africa. Here, we investigate the joint occurrence of six categories of extreme events in East Africa, namely: river floods, droughts, heatwaves, crop failures, wildfires and tropical cyclones using bias-adjusted impact simulations under past and future climate conditions. We show that the pronounced increase in the probability of joint occurrence of these extreme events in the region can be explained by combined changes in frequency, spatial distribution, and dependence of these extreme events induced by climate change. The analysis demonstrates that there is a higher positive correlation between most co-occurring pairs of extremes in the region under end-of-century global warming conditions leading to more frequent concurrence in comparison to the early-industrial period. Our results further highlight that the most affected locations in the region by concurrent extremes are the Nile basin and parts of the Congo basin, whereby river floods and heatwaves emerge as the main driver(s) for concurrent extremes. Our results overall highlight that these concurrent extremes will become the norm rather than the exception in East Africa, even under low-end warming scenarios.