Understanding the climate impacts associated with temporarily overshooting 1.5°C

The PROVIDE project is working to build an interactive web tool that displays the impacts of exceeding a 1.5°C temperature threshold on human activities and industries. Built for everyday users and adaptation practitioners alike, the PROVIDE Climate Services Dashboard uses high-resolution modelling on a variety of spatial scales, allowing climate impacts to be explored under different global warming scenarios. The goal of the project is to allow risk thresholds to be the starting point for adaptation planning.

The 1.5°C Paris Agreement long-term temperature goal guides global climate action to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. However, under current emissions trajectories, overshooting 1.5°C is a distinct possibility. Even if we only temporarily exceed 1.5°C in the near term, we could still cross climate thresholds, tipping the climate system into a new state, which would severely limit our adaptation options.

The PROVIDE project aims to reverse the impact chain to allow researchers, everyday users, and adaptation practitioners to set risk thresholds for societal impacts (e.g. health issues due to heatwaves) caused by geophysical impacts (e.g. sea-level rise) so that they can analyse under which conditions these impacts can be avoided.

To achieve this, we have developed our tool with a framework of multiple temperature overshoot pathways, using a chain of computationally light-weight climate emulators that operate across scales (global, regional, and urban cities).

The output tool – the PROVIDE Climate Services Dashboard – is an online platform providing detailed information on temperature overshoot scenarios and their expected impacts on human industries and activities, including extreme events, biodiversity loss, cryosphere loss, sea-level rise, and the effects on agriculture, economies, socio-economic vulnerabilities, and others. The information includes global, national, and city-level modelling results.

Methodology

First, PROVIDE links global emissions pathways to sectoral impacts, such as agriculture or infrastructure across spatial scales and urban climate risk projections. High-resolution modelling was carried out for 140 cities, 100 of which are European.

Second, PROVIDE assesses the risks of high-overshoot global warming scenarios (overshooting the 1.5 C temperature threshold) and the potentially irreversible impacts of exceeding these thresholds, including sea-level rise, permafrost loss, glacier loss and biodiversity loss, on human sectors and industries.

Third, PROVIDE explores global and regional climate change risks and impacts under current emissions pathways in countries’ climate targets vs Paris Agreement limits and overshoot implications.

Finally, the PROVIDE project offers an additional overshoot proofing methodology as a tool within the Climate Services Dashboard. The overshoot proofing methodology supplements existing adaptation decision-support tools and apply to national and local adaptation policies worldwide and their related decision-making frameworks. PROVIDE then uses the overshoot proofing methodology to two EU sectoral adaptation strategies: agriculture and infrastructure. The data’s design and presentation is co-developed together with stakeholders.