We thank the Gridded Human Population of the World Database and the National Center for Environmental Prediction and Department of Defense reanalysis database for making their data openly available and B. Jones for sharing human population projections. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP5, and thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Supplementary Table 1) for producing and making available their model outputs. We also thank D. Schanzenbach, S. Cleveland and R. Merrill from the University of Hawai’i Super Computer Facility for allowing access to computing facilities and Hawai’i SeaGrant for providing funds to acquire some of the computers used in these analyses. Q. Chen, A. Smith, C. Dau, R. Fang and S. Seneviratne provided valuable contributions to the paper. The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or as reflecting the views of the Army or the Department of Defense. We thank R. Carmichael, M. Deaton, D. Johnson and M. Smith in ESRI’s Applications Prototype Lab for the creation of the online mapping application. This paper was developed as part of the graduate course on ‘Methods for Large-Scale Analyses’ in the Department of Geography, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.