2008 — Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Why so much water runs down the rivers

10/22/2008 - Humans are increasingly altering the amount of water that runs from the land to the sea or inland waters. Calculations with a global vegetation and hydrology model indicate that precipitation had the largest impact on global river discharge over the 20th century. Regionally, however, discharge varied according to factors such as land use change and irrigation practices, temperature, and the concentration of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) report in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters”. The impact of these mainly anthropogenically driven factors on discharge and the availability of water for human use is expected to grow in the future.

Good Prospects for Eastern Germany’s Agriculture

09/16/2008 – More than most other economic sectors agriculture depends on climatic conditions. On behalf of the German Bodenverwertungs- und -verwaltungs GmbH (BVVG), researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) have analysed the effects of climate change on Eastern Germany’s agriculture. The risk of Eastern Germany’s acreage losing in value is low, Frank Wechsung said at a press conference held by the BVVG in Berlin last Friday. Negative impacts of climate change could be countered by appropriate adaptation measures and crop yields could even be raised.

Ottmar Edenhofer takes on chairmanship within IPCC

09/04/2008 - Ottmar Edenhofer was appointed as joint chair of Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Geneva, Switzerland. The deputy director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Berlin Institute of Technology will be co-chairing the Working Group “Mitigation of Climate Change” with Ramón Pichs Madruga from Cuba and Youba Sokona from Mali. In the next seven years the co-chairs will map out strategies for solutions in climate and energy issues and lay out the groundwork for worldwide emissions trading.

Future tipping points in the climate could be unveiled

09/01/2008 - Past events of abrupt climatic change were preceded by characteristic symptoms that may also indicate future abrupt changes induced by global warming.

Climate change threatens one in five plant species

08/07/2008 - Climate change alters growing conditions in many regions of the world. How global warming could affect Germany’s flora researchers have now simulated using computer models.

Protecting climate is protecting biodiversity

05/16/2008 - Climatic change is endangering Earth’s biodiversity, the natural variety of plants and animals. Ahead of the upcoming conference of the parties of the UN Convention on Biodiversity, researchers of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) point out that climate protection and protection of biodiversity are closely related. Implementing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is a precondition to conserve many ecosystems and their functionality for human society. To protect biodiversity facilitates adaptation to climatic change, aids mitigation of climate impacts and generally maintains a broader scope of ecosystem-related policies.

Six companies start Product Carbon Footprint pilot scheme in Germany

04/15/2008 - Supported by WWF, Öko-Institut Freiburg, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and THEMA1 today six companies start a joint pilot scheme in Berlin. For selected products they will assess emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, so called Product Carbon Footprints (PCF).

Ministry of Environment of Rhineland-Palatinate and PIK initiate research collaboration

04/03/2008 - The Potsdam Institute and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Consumer Protection of the German federal state Rhineland-Palatinate are co-operation partners. The state’s Environment Minister and PIK director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber signed today an agreement for an open-ended collaboration. The first joint research activity is a project about climate change and its impacts on landscapes in Rhineland-Palatinate – “KlimLandRP”.

Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system

02/05/2008 - Anthropogenic forcing could push the Earth’s climate system past critical thresholds, so that important components may “tip” into qualitatively different modes of operation. In the renowned magazine PNAS (online-edition) an international team of researchers describes, where small changes can have large long-term consequences on human and ecological systems.

21st century water management: Calculating with the unknown

02/01/2008 - Climate change is making a central assumption of water management obsolete: Water-resource risk assessment and planning are currently based on the notion that factors such as precipitation and streamflow fluctuate within an unchanging envelope of variability. But anthropogenic change of Earth’s climate is altering the means and extremes of these factors so that this paradigm of stationarity no longer applies, researchers report in the latest issue of “Science”.