By connecting the real and virtual worlds digital twins help create, test and deploy the disruptive technologies and ideas needed to respond to the climate crisis at an unprecedented pace. A look at how experts such as Peter Bauer, Director of Destination Earth at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, are using digital twins to help plan and define the future.
Is it possible and what are the consequences of exceeding a given global mean temperature threshold and then bringing warming back down again? Although a limited and temporary climate overshoot is better than reaching a peak temperature and staying there, some of its impacts may be irreversible and could push ecosystems towards dangerous tipping points.
Oceans will play a key part in the ongoing transition: they are an invaluable resource for the climate-neutral world, providing renewable energy, food, and solutions. However, they also host fragile ecosystems that are suffering from climate inaction. Policymakers, scientists, financial actors, and civil society have their eyes fixed on the sea, because “there can be no Green Deal without a sustainable blue economy.”
We have the technological solutions we need. The price of renewable energy is lower than ever. The cost of inaction is far greater than the economic impacts of the transition. Insights on media and expert opinions on the opportunities highlighted in the IPCC report on mitigation of climate change.
One message rings clear above all others: it’s now or never for tackling climate change. Headlines, editorials, tweets, webinars, podcasts and more reactions from around the world to the latest instalment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 assessment report (WGIII).
The impacts of a changing climate on people and communities are taking center stage, leading to an increasing focus on both the theoretical and practical implications of climate justice.
Without a marked acceleration in cutting CO2 emissions, plans to meet climate goals increasingly rely on capturing excess carbon dioxide emissions, processing them and then storing them. From technology and opportunities, to objectives, risks, costs and global policies, an in-depth look at one of the key debates surrounding climate change mitigation.
The European Union is at a crossroads: business as usual, a new era, or fragmentation and conflict. Drawing confidence and inspiration from its management of the COVID crisis, Europe must now face the inescapable challenge of shaping a future that deals with the global pandemic’s aftereffects, the climate crisis, and escalating political turmoil. The High-Level Group of academics reflects on the main economic and social challenges the European economy will face in the post-COVID environment.
The United Nations’ latest climate report has brought media, experts and opinionists around the globe to reflect on the urgency of climate change, the irreversible consequences of our inaction and the different ways in which individual countries will be forced to adress adaptation challenges, climate change impacts and their own specific vulnerabilities.
Scenarios are not predictions. They are a construction of a future that looks at the consequences of given developments and actions. A future that is being sculpted by our current actions.
What is it that makes one statement more reliable than another and how can we claim that science has reached a consensus on any given issue? Increasingly, talk of climate change revolves around discussions of a “scientific consensus” and how this shapes our present and future understanding of climate issues and policymaking.
Winter Olympics should stir up images of snow-clad peaks and pristine mountains. Yet the Winter Games are increasingly held in areas with scarce snowfall and involve the development of new infrastructure which can scar the surrounding landscape and threaten nature reserves. So, what is a sustainable Olympic Games and can Beijing 2022 help change this narrative?
