Climate impacts at 1.5° and 2° - where half a degree makes a difference
The ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. In this context, the Paris Agreement sets a long-term temperature goal of holding the global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C, and pursuing efforts to limit this to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. While discussions around these temperature limits have been on-going for years, assessments of the implications of such levels of global temperature increase is still limited.
In this talk I will present a regionally differentiated analysis on impact shifts between these levels of warming for a range of impact indicators. Our study shows a discernible differences between the two warming levels on the regional level and our results indicate that tropical regions will bear the brunt of impacts.
Dr Lissner leads Climate Analytics’ work in the field of socio-ecological systems and vulnerability. Her work focusses on the assessment of climate impacts, with a special interest in human-environmental systems and impacts on societally important sectors. In this context, Dr Lissner works on translating the various determinants of vulnerability into methods, which advance the comparability and transferability of results between regions and which provide useful information to stakeholders and decision-makers in especially vulnerable regions. She has published on a range of topics in the field of climate impacts, including recent publications on impacts at 1.5°C of warming.
She has a background in Geography, Political Science and Environmental Management and holds a PhD in Geography from Humboldt University, Berlin, which she developed while working in the Climate Change & Development Group at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.