Islands facing a dry future

A new way of modeling the effects of climate change on islands shows that previous analyses underestimated the number of islands that would become substantially more arid by mid century–73 percent, up from an estimate of 50 percent. That leaves the population of those islands—approximately 18 million people—in the position of being what CIRES Fellow Kris Karnauskas, the paper's lead author, and his coauthors refer to as “computationally disenfranchised.”