Woodside's $12 billion liquified natural gas development could lead to 1.37 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere in its lifetime. Among other consequences, the acidic pollution from the facility will damage irreplaceable rock art.
Our areas of expertise
- Adaptation gap assessments
- Adaptation options
- Costs and benefits of adaptation
- Costs of residual damages
- Loss and Damage
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Our programs and studies mainly focus on scientific and economic analysis of adaptation options, including cost of residual damages and policy inputs. Our policy experts play an important role in providing real-time support and advice to delegates at UN Climate change negotiations on issues related to adaptation and loss and damage. Our experts have contributed to Africa’s Adaptation Gap reports, published in 2013 and 2015, and for the global level and study on Loss and Damage in Africa.
Latest
The global climate crisis is local and personal in impact. The heatwave in India and Pakistan brings a discussion about the threshold humans can withstand wet bulb temperatures. Fahad Saeed speaks with Inside Climate News about the threshold.
Farmlands in Nepal have shrunk 2.1 per cent in the period from 2000 through 2019, due largely to migration and shortage of labour. About 10 per cent of this agricultural land has been converted into forest cover, leading to a 1.9 per cent increase in the same time period.
Our Head of LDC Support Team, Manjeet Dhakal, is interviewed in this piece from The Khatmandu Post on the latest IPCC WGII report and its implications for climate funding and governance in Nepal.
The energy crisis spurred by the war in Ukraine has governments evaluating how homes, factories, and cars are powered. Manjeet Dhakal says Nepal should learn from this crisis based on its own energy history in times of crisis.
In this piece, our Head of LDC Support Team based in Katmandu, Manjeet Dhakal, is interviewed on the latest IPCC WGII report, and the urgency of taking action to reduce the risks for LDCs, such as Nepal.
Wired speaks with Adelle Thomas about the new IPCC report. A special focus is put on the ability of urban areas to limit the threats of climate change and the impact it has on those most vulnerable.
Publications
This report looks into the application of CLIMADA (CLIMate ADAptation), a natural catastrophe model that calculates climate risk and potential of adaptation in the Caribbean. The study marks a starting point to determine economic losses and damages as well as adaptation measures for the region which is commonly exposed to natural disasters.
Travel cost method, descriptive statistics and a two-step Heckman method are used to analyse the use and economic value of indigenous seasonal climate forecasts (ISCF) in Benin. ISCF were produced based on the observation of abiotic and biotic indicators in Kandi, Glazoué and Zè with the observations largely undertaken by local elders and professional traditional forecasters.
Burkina Faso is highly vulnerable to the increasing impacts of climate change and currently has large adaptation deficits. Systematic policy document analysis, semi-structured interviews and participant observations were undertaken to explore how scientific information makes its way into national adaptation policy documents from its production to its inclusion into policies.
The COP26 climate summit in Glasgow saw important progress made on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA). However, there is much work still to be done to bring the GGA concept to life. Striking a balance between the GGA serving its ‘global’ purpose, whilst providing sufficient flexibility for countries to describe their own adaptation objectives and progress will ultimately determine the effectiveness of the GGA.
Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. This paper systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers to identify eight priority areas for research.
Increasing evidence suggests that climate change impacts are already observed around the world. Global environmental assessments face challenges to appraise the growing literature. Here we use the language model BERT to identify and classify studies on observed climate impacts, producing a comprehensive machine-learning-assisted evidence map.
Small island developing states are currently faced with two significant challenges that are more onerous due to limited financial resources: adapting to increasing climate change risk and recovering from the pandemic. Debt-for-climate swaps provide an avenue for SIDS to address these challenges.
Projects
The "Climate Action Tracker" is an independent science-based assessment, which tracks the emission commitments and actions of countries.
Supported by UNEP, the Economic Growth and Climate Change in Africa research assesses how climate variability affects economic output.
Project Period: 2014 - 2015
The EmBARK-project investigates time scales and possible trajectories of socio-economic transformation processes and analyse their relevance as potential barriers to adaptation to climate change. An improved understanding of the temporal dynamics of such barriers is key in developing a more realistic understanding of future climate impacts and for scientifically robust assessment of future climate related loss and damage.
IMPACT is a cross-cutting, multi-faceted project that aims to strengthen the connections between the scientific assessments of climate impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to help enable access to finance and help Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) implement concrete projects.
The project aims to investigate how changes in land cover and land management can help to meet the mitigation and adaptation objectives of the Paris Agreement, as well as the Sustainable Development Goals. The project partners findings will be disseminated through a number of tools, events and products and by closely involving stakeholders and policy-makers, with the aim to support sustainable land use decision-making.
SLICE is investigating Short- and Long-Term Impacts of Climate Extremes and aims to develop a systematic understanding of the channels through which climate extremes impact socio-economic development all the way from the household to the macroeconomic level. This will help developing effective strategies for long-term economic development under climate change.