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.
Our areas of expertise include:
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Dr. Michiel Schaeffer
Our work focuses on understanding the effects of climate change on livelihood realities and development perspectives of especially vulnerable population groups. Impact and vulnerability assessments provide an important basis for the identification of adaptation requirements as well as analyses of loss and damage. Through assessing the implications of impacts at different levels of warming, we gain a better understanding of the implications of different emission pathways. SIDS and LDCs face particularly great challenges. Their physical exposure and the limited number of available adaptation options as well as adaptive capacity are key determinants of their vulnerability.
Publications
New paper finds that children are to face disproportionate increases in lifetime extreme event exposure – especially in low-income countries.
Although effects on labour is one of the most tangible and attributable climate impact, our quantification of these effects is insufficient and based on weak methodologies. Partly, this gap is due to the inability to resolve different impact channels, such as changes in time allocation (labour supply) and slowdown of work (labour productivity). Explicitly resolving those in a multi-model inter-comparison framework can help to improve estimates of the effects of climate change on labour effectiveness.
This briefings summarise the impacts of global warming at and above 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial levels. Key information is extracted from the Special Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of its sixth assessment report cycle (AR6). These Special Reports represent an invaluable resource to understand the impacts of exceeding 1.5°C and new science published after their compilation has only contributed to an ever clearer picture of the grave consequences of exceeding that limit. In addition to the overview on climate impacts based on the Special Reports, latest information on global mitigation efforts and requirements to meet the 1.5°C limit are also included.
The IPCC special report on climate change and land outlines how land is subject to human pressure in the Anthropocene. This report is a brief on the contents on this report.
The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C sent a message of urgency. The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate re-emphasises it and adds the dimensions of legacy of our actions. It shows how changes in ocean and cryosphere will continue for centuries and millennia even after emissions have seized.
The study calculates the impact of an additional half degree of warming between 1.5°C and 2°C for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, a region that is already experiencing lethal heat events. It finds that governments can virtually halve exposure to potentially lethal temperatures if global efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C are successful.