Publications

The papers in this special issue of Regional Environmental Change address the question of what may be dangerous levels of climate change: the papers describe and analyse the vulnerability of human and natural systems in a number of regions around the world.

Despite large uncertainty, there are several robust conclusions from published literature for policy makers and research agendas: agriculture everywhere in Africa runs some risk to be negatively affected by climate change; existing cropping systems and infrastructure will have to change to meet future demand.

Aggregations of greenhouse gas mitigation pledges by countries are frequently used to indicate whether resulting global emissions in 2020 will be 'on track' to limit global temperature increase to below specific warming levels such as 1.5 or 2 °C. We find that historical emission levels aggregated from data that are officially reported by countries to the UNFCCC are lower than independent global emission estimates, such as the IPCC SRES scenarios.

Here the main characteristics of the new version 1.2 of the three-dimensional Earth system model of intermediate complexity LOVECLIM are briefly described.

By simply summing up their communicated numbers, developed country Parties so far meet their collective commitment of USD 30 billion for the period 2010-2012. This result however is distorted as countries discretionally decide which funding is eligible to be counted as fast-start finance (FSF). Clarification on the notion of additionality will be needed to assess what is really delivered as fast-start finance.