SignificanceWe project drought losses in China under global warming of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C. To assess future drought losses, we project the regional gross domestic product under shared socioeconomic pathways instead of using a static socioeconomic scenario. We identify increasing precipitation and evapotranspiration patterns. With increasing drought intensity and areal coverage across China, drought losses will increase considerably. The estimated losses in a sustainable development pathway at 1.5 °C warming will be 10 times higher than in the reference period 1986–2005 and three times higher than in 2006–2015. Yet, climate change mitigation, limiting the temperature increase to 1.5 °C, can considerably reduce the annual drought losses in China, compared with 2.0 °C warming.

The increase in surface air temperature in China has been faster than the global rate, and more high temperature spells are expected to occur in future. Here we assess the annual heat-related mortality in densely populated cities of China at 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C global warming. For this, the urban population is projected under five SSPs, and 31 GCM runs as well as temperature-mortality relation curves are applied. The annual heat-related mortality is projected to increase from 32.1 per million inhabitants annually in 1986–2005 to 48.8–67.1 per million for the 1.5 °C warming and to 59.2–81.3 per million for the 2.0 °C warming, taking improved adaptation capacity into account. Without improved adaptation capacity, heat-related mortality will increase even stronger. If all 831 million urban inhabitants in China are considered, the additional warming from 1.5 °C to 2 °C will lead to more than 27.9 thousand additional heat-related deaths, annually.