|
photo: thinkstock |
RESEARCH Climate-proof cities & Infrastructure Sustainable Transition Pathways |
|---|
For details regarding the projects please contact the responsible persons or our coordinator Ms. Christiane Walter.
IMpeTUs - Climate Change Impacts on Migration and Urbanization (2018-2021)
Website of the Impetus project
| Millions of international migrants have recently sought refuge in Europe, animating debates about the best ways to manage migration. Even more people are being displaced within their home countries every year due to natural disasters likefloods and storms; and underlying these sudden events is a steady flow of people leaving their rural livelihoods behind and flocking to the cities in an ongoing trend towards urbanization. Across spatial scales, humanity is on the move. And, that much is clear, climate change plays a role in this: whether in the form of unprecedented droughts that drive people to abandon their fields (as likely happened in Syria just before the war) or through differential impacts on countries’ economies that widen the income gaps and fuel international migration. But how large are the effects of climate change - and how do they interact across spatial scales? Little to no quantitative research is available, and the numbers that have been proposed (e.g. of “environmental refugees”) are often crude estimates, and are highly contested. IMPETUS aims for a unified, quantitative modeling approach to understand the linkages between migration, urbanization, and climate change. |  |
|---|
SUSFOOD - Sustainable Food Systems under Climate Change in South Asia (2017-2019)
| South Asia is a hot spot in terms of the future increases of food demand, mainly due to demo-graphic growth and shifting lifestyle. According to the recent IPCC report, food production in South Asia will be severely impacted under climate change without adaptation (Porter et al. 2014). Currently, around 300 million people in South Asia are undernourished, resulting in the subcontinent with the largest numbers of food-insecure persons. This may exacerbate in the future under climate change and represents our main motivation for finding, in cooperation with the local institutes, solutions that ensure current and future food security in South Asia by exploring options for sustainable and climate smart food systems. |
-
Contact: J. Kropp
EU Calculator: trade-offs and pathways towards sustainable and low-carbon European Societies (2016-2019)
| The EUCalc project aims to deliver an urgently needed comprehensive framework for research, business, and public sector decision makers which identifies and enables an appraisal of synergies and trade-offs of feasible European decarbonisation pathways. The novel and pragmatic modelling approach adopted is rooted between pure complex energy system and emissions models and integrated impact assessment tools. It introduces an intermediate level of complexity and a multi-sector approach that is focused on supporting decision making and will be developed in a co-design process with a broad range of scientific and societal actors. EUCalc explores the impact of the choices that can be made in different sectors, including power and heat generation, transport, industry, buildings, agriculture, and food and of the underlying lifestyle choices of Europe’s citizens in terms of the climatological, societal, and economic consequences. Major outcomes of the project will be a Transition Pathways Explorer and a My Europe 2050 education tool (H2020 #730459). |  |
|---|
Contact: J. Kropp, L. Costa, C. Walter
SUSA - Sustainable land use-based alternatives in the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon (2014-2018)
| The purpose of the project is to develop the capacity of the national environmental authorities and local farmers in the Amazonian regions of Peru and Colombia with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and advancing efforts to adapt to the impacts of climate change. To achieve this, it is supporting the development and implementation of sustainable land use measures that help to preserve carbon sinks such as forests in selected pilot regions (Yurimaguas in Peru and Caquetá in Colombia). The first stage of the project involves analysing the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector and on water-related ecosystem services, such as the regulation of water quality and the availability of water, and thus identifying the need for adaptation. On this basis, and in consideration of the needs of local communities, the project will introduce customised, sustainable land use measures and increase the expertise of its partners in the fields of monitoring and evaluation. It will demonstrate possible ways in which Peru and Colombia can use these land use measures to achieve the ambitious goals they have set themselves in the field of climate change mitigation. The experience gained in the pilot regions can subsequently be applied in other Amazonian regions. |  |
|---|
Contact: J. Kropp, P. Pradhan
Recreate - REsearch network for forward looking activities and assessment of research and innovation prospects in the fields of Climate, Research Efficiency and raw mATErials (2013-2018)
| RECREATE is a policy support network that will collect and analyse strategic information about medium and long-term research, innovation trends, and prospects. It will carry out forward looking analyses in the area climate action, resource efficiency, and raw materials. While the ERA is quite fragmented between topics, actors, and major innovation systems it is the aim of RECREATE to overcome this fragmentation and to create a clear cut research agenda for the Horizon 2020. The project will look at trade-offs and synergies between climate change mitigation, raw materials, and resource efficiency. The project has a perspective beyond 2020. |  |
Contact: J. Kropp, L. Krummenauer
RAMSES - Reconciling Adaptation, Mitigation and Sustainable Development for Cities (2012-2017)
| The RAMSES project delivers much needed quantified evidence of the impacts of climate change and the costs and benefits of a wide range of soft (e.g. land use planning) and hard (e.g infrastructure alteration) adaptation measures. It is the particular aim to develop (i) methods and tools to assess climate impacts, vulnerability and risks in cities; (ii) methods to quantify the full economic costs and benefits of climate change adaptation (integrated top-down/bottom-up approach). RAMSES performs certain case studies in certain European and cities in developing countries. PIK is coordinating the project, partners are Newcastle University, London School of Economics, University Versailles, Bergen University, and others (funded by EU FRP7). |  |
TESS - Towards European Societal Sustainability (2013-2016)
| A broad gap exists between global or national plans and community-based initiatives for transition to a sustainable, low-carbon society. Filling this gap is essential if Europe is to reach ambitious emissions reductions targets whilst still maintaining economic stability. The TESS project will bridge this gap through an analysis of multiple European community-based initiatives (carbon reduction, environmental, political, social, economic and technological) in terms of their “climate efficiency” (i.e. emission savings) and up-scaling potential. TESS project will develop an accounting system to identify general success factors and beneficial impacts that will make initiatives comparable in terms of their trajectories and output.
To disseminate project results and engage stakeholders, the project has setup an interactive platform (www.sustainable-communities.eu) specifically directed at community-based initiatives to network and share experiences throughout Europe. |
 |
Contact: J. Kropp, A. Holsten
CLIP-C - Climate Information Platform for Copernicus (2013-2016)
| CLIP-C will provide access to climate information of direct relevance to a wide variety of users, from scientists to policy makers and private sector decision makers. Information will include data from satellite and in-situ observations, climate models and re-analyses, transformed data products to enable impacts assessments and climate change impact indicators. The platform will complement existing GMES preoperational components, but will focus on datasets which provide information on climate variability on decadal to centennial time scales from observed and projected climate change impacts in Europe, and will provide a toolbox to generate, compare and rank key indicators. Expanding climate data volumes will be supported with a distributed, scalable system, based on international standards. Guidance information on the quality and limitations of all data products will be provided (funded by EU FRP7). |  |
CMF - Climate Media Factory Potsdam (2011ff)
| Joint project between Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Film and Television Academy “Konrad Wolf” on tailor made media products dealing with the transfer of climate knowledge to stakeholders. Financed with seed money from the Federal Goverment of Germany the CMF has now several partners for which it develops tailor made media and eductation products. Among them are the WBGU, GIZ, IASS, BMBF/DE, DECC/UK and others. With the support of the Climate-KIC the CMF developed further into a spin-off. It is an affiliated partner of the Climate-KIC. |  |
