This study investigates the impact of increased global warming on heat stress changes and the potential number of people exposed to heat risks over Africa. For this purpose a heat index has been computed based on an ensemble‐mean of high‐resolution regional climate model simulations from the Coordinated Output for Regional Evaluations embedded in the COordinated Regional Climate Downscaling EXperiment, under two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) scenarios (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5), combined with projections of population growth developed based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) scenarios (SSP1 and SSP5). Results show that by the late 21st century, the increased global warming is expected to induce a 12‐fold increase in the area extent affected by heat stress of high‐risk level. This would result in an increase of about 10%–30% in the number of days with high‐risk heat conditions, as well as about 6%–20% in their magnitude throughout the seasonal cycle over West, Central, and North‐East Africa. Therefore, and because of the lack of adaptation and mitigation policies, the exacerbation of ambient heat conditions could contribute to the exposure of about 2–8.5 million person‐events to heat stress of high‐risk level over Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger, and Nigeria. Furthermore, it was found that the interaction effect between the climate change and population growth seems to be the most dominant in explaining the total changes in exposure due to moderate and high heat‐related risks over all subregions of the African continent.

In this study, the projections of daily rainfall from an ensemble mean of 20 global climate models (GCMs) are used to examine projected trends in heavy rainfall distribution over Central Africa (CA), under the representative concentration pathway 8.5. For this purpose, two analyses periods of 40‐years have been selected (2006–2045 and 2056–2095) to compute trends in the 90th and 99th percentiles of the daily rainfall distributions. We found that large increase trend is mostly found in the 99th percentile of rainfall events, over southern Chad, northern Cameroon, northern Zambia, and in the Great Lakes Area. This can be attributed to the increase of moisture convergence intensified by the presence of the Congo Basin rainforest. It is also shown that the largest number of GCMs with a trend of the same sign as the average trend is observed over the above regions. It is thus clear that the projected increase trends in heavy rainfall events may further worse floods which are real problems in the CA countries. Therefore, strong subregional policies are needed to help design effective adaptation and mitigation measures for the region's countries.

Extreme events like flooding, droughts and heatwave are among the factors causing huge socio‐economic losses to Cameroonians. Investigating the potential response of rainfall and temperature extremes to global warming is therefore critically needed for tailoring and adjusting the country's policies. Recent datasets have been developed for this purpose within the Coordinated Output for Regional Evaluations (CORDEX‐CORE) initiative, at ~25 km grid spacing. These regional climate models were used to dynamically downscaled four global climate models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5), under the optimistic and pessimistic representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 2.6 and 8.5, respectively. These models were employed in this study for characterizing the response of Cameroon's extreme precipitation and temperature events to global warming, using seven indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices. Under global warming, the maximum number of consecutive dry (wet) days' is expected to increase (decrease). However, the annual total rainfall amount is expected to increase, mainly due to the intensification of very wet days and daily rainfall intensity. Furthermore, the temperature‐based indices reveal an increase (decrease) in the total annual hot (cold) days, and overall, changes intensify with increased radiative forcing. The high‐mitigated low‐emission pathway RCP2.6 features attenuated changes, and even sometimes adapts to reverse the sign of changes. Designing reliable policies to limit the risks associated with the above changes is required, as their socio‐economic consequences are likely to include food insecurity, heat‐related illness, population impoverishment, price rises and market instability.