The Paris Agreement requires countries to commit to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to ensure that the global average temperature remains well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. But how likely are we to meet these targets?
As part of CLEX’s engagement with the agricultural sector, Chief Investigators Ailie Gallant and Andrea Taschetto presented an overview of some of the Centre’s relevant research interests to the monthly meeting of the Forewarned is Forearmed Community of Practice (FWFACoP) group in June 2021.
It has been an incredibly busy time for the Knowledge Brokerage Team. We've hired a graphic designer, Ally Crimp, added 3 key briefing notes, become deeply involved with industry sectors, developed our climate classrooms and so much more.
Australian researchers in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes have made major contributions to the 2021 IPCC Working Group 1 report, through the authorship of the report, review and the many scientific papers cited in the report.
Irrespective of tipping points, climate change adaptation efforts will be less costly and disruptive to society – and will stand a better chance of success – if warming can be limited to 1.5°C rather than 2°C or higher. We therefore in no way advocate for policies that forgo pursuing the ambition to limit global warming to 1.5°C, regardless of whether that target remains feasible or not.
In 2021, the Knowledge Brokerage Team has hit the ground running with a paper in ECR, Climate Classrooms at AMOS, a new CLEX prize for engagement, and an increasing number of external links to new and old stakeholders.
Sanaa Hobeichi and Ian Macadam of the CLEX Knowledge Brokerage team are spearheading Climate Classrooms, a joint project of CLEX and the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub (MCCCRH) that aims to raise the profile of climate science in secondary school Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects.
In February CLEX took part in the 28th Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society annual conference. Ian Macadam reports on the conference, which was packed full of plenaries, panel discussions and parallel sessions and incorporated around 400 presentations, many presented by CLEX researchers.
The challenges of 2020 have impacted our briefing notes but we combined forces with NESP ESCC to produce an impressive overview of climate sensitivity. Our mid-term review has invigorated the team and a science-teacher workshop is well underway for AMOS.
CLEX researchers and colleagues examined the contribution to uncertainty in simulated future changes in crop yields using the change-factor method and an additional, more sophisticated, statistical downscaling method of generating realistic future climate data from climate model output.