Climate change on the agenda at Assembly of the European Geosciences Union

One of the four union-wide Great Debates at the Annual General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) was focused on the topic of “Negotiating climate policy – resigning to resilience?” All panelists as well as the audience clearly agreed that a strong agreement in Paris is of utmost importance, as society won’t be able to cope with the magnitude and velocity of the warming that current pathways will be leading us to. Adaptation and mitigation will have to go hand in hand to cope with the challenges ahead.

The importance of underpinning the international negotiating process with sound science was also widely agreed upon in the Union debate. It was also underlined that tools to communicate climate change information, such as the Climate Action Tracker, are extremely conducive in informing the public and raising awareness of the relevance of climate change.

Climate Analytics scientists Dr Tabea Lissner and Dr Carl-Friedrich Schleußner contributed to the discussion by convening a session on Climate impacts at different levels of warming and by presenting their work in several sessions:

Climate change, livelihoods and the multiple determinants of water adequacy: two approaches at regional to global scale

A risk-based approach to assess projected yield changes at regional scale

Assessing regional and warming level dependent differences in climate impacts

Cascading effects of deforestation and drying trends on reduced forest resilience in the Amazon