PIK Research Days 2025: Interdisciplinary climate research under one roof
13.03.2025 - From the stability of the Atlantic overturning circulation and new findings on climate solutions to the social dynamics of populism and climate policy - the PIK Research Days 2025 on March 11 and 12 offered a comprehensive insight into the latest research findings of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). In addition to intensive discussions and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, the focus was also on diversity, freedom and inclusion: values that characterize PIK's scientific approach.
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Major risk assessment links climate change with Germany’s national security
13/02/2025 – A new National Interdisciplinary Climate Risk Assessment outlines the risks to Germany’s national security resulting from climate change through 2040. It provides the first comprehensive overview of the many cascading and compounding climate risks. The Assessment will be officially presented at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025. Developed under Germany’s National Security Strategy 2023, it was co-authored by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in collaboration with various partners.
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Two PIK researchers involved in new IPCC Special Report on cities
04/02/2025 – Gunnar Luderer and Felix Creutzig from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) will contribute to the new IPCC Special Report as lead authors. In March 2027, the IPCC will publish its fourth Special Report, this time on “Climate Change and Cities”. The team of 97 authors from 56 countries has now been announced.
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Green hydrogen: Big gaps between ambition and implementation
14.01.2025 - In recent years, more than 60 countries have developed strategies to stimulate the market ramp-up of hydrogen, particularly in the industrial sector. However, in 2023, less than ten percent of the originally announced green hydrogen production was realised, shows a new study published in the journal ‘Nature Energy’. The main reason: hydrogen remains an expensive good for which there is little willingness to pay. Adrian Odenweller and Falko Ueckerdt from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) determine this competitiveness gap for all 1232 globally announced hydrogen projects. They advocate for a robust political strategy that is based on realistic expectations for hydrogen and closes the implementation gap.
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Climate fee on food could effectively cut greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture while ensuring a social balance
10.01.2025 - Greenhouse gas emissions in German agriculture could be significantly reduced in a socially equitable way through a climate fee on food, combined with climate dividends. This is the key finding of a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The study suggests that pricing greenhouse gas-intensive foods could help meet climate targets for agriculture while generating over 8.2 billion Euros annually. If these funds were redistributed to households through a lump-sum compensation scheme, it would ease the financial burden on households, especially those with lower incomes and at the same time encourage sustainable consumption.
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IPBES Nexus Report: Integrated solutions to address interconnected global crises
17.12.2024 - Current efforts to tackle biodiversity loss, climate change, water scarcity, and challenges in food security and health are often disconnected and fail to account for the complexity of these interconnected crises, a landmark new report finds. The Nexus Assessment, published by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), calls for more integrated solutions. It highlights how ongoing biodiversity decline—primarily driven by human activity and climate change—directly affects food security, water quality and availability, health, resilience to climate impacts, and nearly all other contributions that nature makes to human well-being. It’s the first comprehensive global report to explore the interlinkages of these crises.
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Energy-intensive industry: importing selected primary products and securing value creation and jobs
10.12.2024 - The competitiveness of the chemical and steel industry in Germany could be strengthened in the long term through the partial import of inexpensive green primary products and a focus on high added value in industrial processing. This is shown in a new report by scientists from the Kopernikus project Ariadne, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Ariadne researchers analyze how the German energy-intensive primary industry can become climate-neutral and remain competitive at the same time.
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Global Recognition: PIK researchers again part of the top 1% of the world’s most cited scientists
20.11.2024 - For the seventh year in a row, scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) are represented in the top 1 percent of the “Highly Cited Researchers”. The prestigious ranking, released by Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science platform, is determined by the frequency with which scientists' papers are cited by other researchers — a measure of global scientific impact. The 2024 edition features ten PIK researchers from different research departments, including PIK Director Johan Rockström.
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PIK expertise at COP29 in Azerbaijan
11.11.2024 - The 29th UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) takes place from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan. The conference brings together delegates from nearly 200 countries, including leading scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), to discuss the latest scientific findings and policy measures to mitigate the climate crisis.
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Three pathways to achieve global climate and sustainable development goals
30.10.2024 - Sustainable lifestyles, green-tech innovation, and government-led transformation each offer promising routes to make significant progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, according to a new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The team of researchers examined how these strategies could transform consumption and production across different sectors, identifying both benefits and trade-offs for enhancing human well-being within planetary boundaries. Contrary to the belief that the path to sustainable development is increasingly out of reach, the results show that humankind has a variety of pathways to depart from its current unsustainable trajectory.
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New attribution studies: Increasing effects of global warming on fire dynamics and public health
21.10.2024 - Climate change is increasingly influencing fire behavior worldwide and intensifying fire smoke, endangering public health from air pollution caused by fires. These are the results of two new climate change impact attribution studies, both published in Nature Climate Change, with involvement of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK. The first study finds 15.8 percent higher global burned areas over the period 2003 to 2019 due to climate change, intensifying fire activity especially in Australia, South America, Western North America and Siberia. These increasing fire dynamics offset the decrease in burned area due to land-use changes and increasing population density. Building on this, the second study examines how climate change is linked to a global increase in deaths from fire-related air pollution. Climate change increased these deaths from 669 annually in the 1960s to over 12,500 in the 2010s.
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Scientists caution no guarantees when it comes to overshooting 1.5°C
09.10.2024 - Even if it is possible to reverse the rise of global temperatures after a temporary “overshoot” of 1.5 degrees Celsius, some climate damages triggered at peak warming will be irreversible, a study published in Nature shows. The earlier net zero emissions can be accomplished, the lower peak warming will be, and the smaller the risks of irreversible impacts, an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), finds. They analysed future scenarios in which 1.5°C of global warming are temporarily exceeded and temperatures are brought back down in the long run.
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Katja Frieler: Climate Impact Professorship at the University of Potsdam
05.06.2024 - Katja Frieler, head of the “Transformation Pathways” research department and the “Pathway-specific climate risks” division at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), took up the professorship for Climate Impacts at the University of Potsdam on April 1 this year.
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Credibility makes or breaks the price: political commitment in long-term climate policy key for effective EU emissions trading system
30.05.2024 - High policy credibility is crucial for carbon prices in the EU emissions trading system (EU ETS) to be high enough to efficiently incentivise emission reductions in the long term, a new study finds. A team of scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) shows that two consecutive ETS reforms elevated CO₂ prices from below 10 Euro per ton of CO₂ in 2017 to about 80 Euro per ton of CO₂ in 2022, not only by tightening the cap, but also by firming up political commitment to it. This effectively made firms act with more foresight, emitting less in the short term to store certificates for future use.
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From ocean currents to the energy transition: thousands visit PIK for Potsdam Science Day
04.05.2024 - Under the motto "Research. Discover. Join in.", the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), together with the other Telegrafenberg institutes, hosted this year's Potsdam Science Day. On the first Saturday in May 6,200 interested visitors came to find out about the work of researchers at PIK at information stands, lectures and hands-on experiments in the sunshine and spring-like temperatures.
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Towards the next steps in climate impact research and ISIMIP4: ISIMIP-PROCLIAS workshop was a great success
22-26/04/2024 - From including adaptation to climate change in climate impact simulations to the road towards the next IPCC cycle - the cross-sectoral ISIMIP-PROCLIAS workshop covered a broad variety of topics and featured high-level discussion sessions on how to align future climate impact research with the IPCC timelines and ScenarioMIP process.
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Climate change could become the most important driver of biodiversity loss by mid-century
26.04.2024 - Whereas global biodiversity has declined between 2 and 11 percent during the 20th century due to land-use change alone, climate change could become the main driver of biodiversity decline by the mid-21st century. That is the result of the largest modelling study of its kind by more than 50 scientists from over 40 institutions now published in the journal Science. The study was led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), with contribution of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
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Securing competitiveness of energy-intensive industries through structural change: The pulling power of renewables
23.04.2024 - Countries with limited potential for renewables could save up to 20 percent of costs for green steel and up to 40 percent for green chemicals from green hydrogen if they relocated their energy-intensive production and would import from countries where renewable energy is cheaper, finds a new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). This ‘renewables pull’ would create strong incentives for businesses to invest in low-emission production facilities in these renewable-rich countries. Renewable-scarce countries could put all focus on down-stream production and refinement as the smart way to secure industrial competitiveness.
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Food matters: Healthy diets increase the economic and physical feasibility of 1.5°C
28.03.2024 - A global shift to a healthier, more sustainable diet could be a huge lever to limit global warming to 1.5°C, researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) find. The resulting reduction of greenhouse gas emissions would increase the available carbon budget compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and allow to achieve the same climate outcome with less carbon dioxide removal and less stringent CO2 emissions reductions in the energy system. This would also reduce emission prices, energy prices and food expenditures.
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From Planetary Boundaries to Global Commons: “PIK Research Days” with latest science update
15.02.2024 – From planetary boundaries and tipping points to global commons and the economic implications of climate change, from methods like integrated assessment modeling or machine learning to the science-policy interface: The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research gathered for its traditional in-house conference, the “PIK Research Days”. The two-day event was packed with talks, panel discussions and elevator pitches about current and planned research.
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Increasing nitrogen fertilization could pollute rivers and worsen water scarcity
06.02.2024 – In the 2050s, one-third of the world's rivers could be affected by water scarcity or be polluted by nitrogen. This is the result of a study by an international team of scientists, including researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and led by scientists of Wageningen University. They assessed the scarcity of clean water under ongoing climate change and show how water pollution from intensified agriculture and untreated sewage could limit clean water supply.
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A fifth higher: Tropical cyclones substantially raise the Social Cost of Carbon
11/23/2023 - Extreme events like tropical cyclones have immediate impacts, but also long-term implications for societies. A new study published in the journal Nature Communications now finds: Accounting for the long-term impacts of these storms raises the global Social Cost of Carbon by more than 20 percent, compared to the estimates currently used for policy evaluations. This increase is mainly driven by the projected rise of tropical-cyclone damages to the major economies of India, USA, China, Taiwan, and Japan under global warming.
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More new fossil gas heating systems, only tentative progress: energy transition update
11/22/2023 - Reduced fossil fuel consumption due to the energy crisis, tentative positive signs in the expansion of renewable energy capacities, electric cars and heat pumps – but all this is not happening fast enough, according to new figures from the Ariadne Transformation Tracker. Moreover, the German energy transition is not yet on track when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels in the heating and transport sectors. Instead of the necessary decline, there has been a clear increase in the sale of new cars with combustion engines and new gas heating systems compared to the previous year.
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Highly Cited: PIK scientists among top 1% of the world's most cited researchers
11/15/2023 – For the sixth year in a row, numerous researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) are among the top 1 percent of the renowned “Highly Cited Researchers” worldwide. The influential ranking, published by Clarivate Analytics' science platform Web of Science, is based on the number of times scientists' papers are cited by other researchers – a very important indicator of scientific relevance. The 2023 edition includes eight PIK researchers from different research departments, also PIK Director Johan Rockström.
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Land taxation can reduce wealth inequality
11/14/2023 - Taxing land instead of capital could reduce the widening gap between rich and poor in societies, finds a new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). A team of scientists shows that, in a world of rising inequality, shifting the tax burden away from capital to land taxation could restore balance and promote economic growth. Especially people with little or no wealth could benefit from land taxes, for example in the form of less rapidly rising housing costs. The few municipalities, that have implemented land rent taxation so far, have used it to finance public transport, among other infrastructure investments.
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Novel perspectives on cross-border cascading climate change impacts and systemic risks
10/27/2023 – Transitioning towards climate-adaptive and resilient societies – that was the overarching aim of the conference “Cross-border climate change impacts and systemic risks in Europe and beyond” at Potsdam-Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK). For three days in mid-October, 150 scientists from all over the world came together across disciplines to better understand and respond to the emerging topic of cross-border climate impacts and risks.
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Getting expectations right more relevant than getting prices right: Credibility is key for policies to achieve net zero targets
09/18/2023 - For net-zero policies to be successful, it is key that they succeed in shaping the expectations of private investors that long-term targets are firm. This is the result of new research by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Resources for the Future and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published today in Nature Climate Change.
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Worse than diesel and gasoline? Bioenergy as bad as fossils if there is no pricing of CO2 emissions from land-use change
06/26/2023 - Demand for modern biofuels is expected to grow substantially in order to mitigate climate emissions. However, they are far from being a climate neutral alternative to gasoline and diesel. A new study in Nature Climate Change shows that under current land-use regulations, CO2 emission factors for biofuels might even exceed those for fossil diesel combustion due to large-scale land clearing related to growing biomass. Before bioenergy can effectively contribute to achieving carbon neutrality, international agreements need to ensure the effective protection of forests and other natural lands by introducing carbon pricing, the expert team from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) argues.
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Cross-sectoral PROCLIAS-ISIMIP workshop 2023 in Prague
14/06/2023 - Another successful cross-sectoral PROCLIAS/ ISIMIP workshop filled with plenary and parallel sessions on ISIMIP simulation results, data and protocols for climate impact simulations, IPCC representative key risks and cross-sectoral climate impacts took place, this time in Prague.
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PIK expertise at "Leibniz in the Bundestag"
05/26/2023 - From hydrogen to the EU climate goals, from moorland protection to the animal welfare tax: researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) were represented across all research areas with numerous topics at "Leibniz in the Bundestag". With this political format, the Leibniz Association annually offers members of the German Bundestag one-on-one discussions with scientists.
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