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04/06/2019 –Climate change knows no borders, and climate crises can affect security, ranging from food security and displacement to an increasing number of natural disasters. Indeed, a destabilised Earth system can make peace harder to achieve and sustain, and may even be a contributing factor to new violent conflicts. This makes our climate a foreign policy issue. In cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office and the think tank adelphi, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has initiated the Berlin Climate and Security Conference to provide a forum for this rising issue. The summit will gather support for the “Berlin Call for Action”, directed at every foreign policy institution to step up efforts to address one of the greatest global security and foreign policy challenges of the 21st century: Climate change.

13/05/2019 – Policies that aim at limiting dangerous climate change need to account for food security issues. For the first time, tradeoffs between climate mitigation and food security have now been analyzed in a so-called multi-model assessment: many different computer simulations dealing with the same issue. The costs for food-smart climate policies are around 0.2% of global economic output in 2050, an international team of scientists. However, carelessly designed climate policy could increase the number of people at risk of hunger, at least compared to a baseline scenario, according to the study now published in Nature Sustainability. Compared to today, the number of people at risk of hunger is likely to sink in all scenarios studied. Yet if no climate policy at all would be implemented, the resulting risks for crop failure due to droughts and floods might also lead to hunger and costs. Including these impacts of extreme events is a challenge for future research.

04/03/2019 - For the first time, security risks arising from human-made climate change have been a center-stage topic at the Munich Security Conference this year. This unparalleled meeting of global security experts, including heads of states and high-ranking military officials, invited Hans Joachim Schellnhuber to present his assessment of the state of the climate crisis and its consequences for international policy making. Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus and founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, emphasized how reducing greenhouse gas emissions is ultimately a matter of preserving our civilization.

31.01.2019 - Extreme rainfall events in one city or region are connected to the same kind of events thousands of kilometers away, an international team of experts finds in a study now published in one of the world’s leading scientific journals, Nature. They discovered a global connection pattern of extreme rainfall – this could eventually improve weather forecasts and hence help to limit damages and protect people. Extreme rainfall events are on the rise due to human-caused climate change, which makes the study even more relevant. The researchers developed a new method rooted in complex systems science to analyze satellite data. The revealed extreme rainfall patterns are likely linked to giant airflows known as jetstreams that circle the globe high up in the atmosphere, forming huge waves between the Equator and the Poles.

14.12.2018 - Kira Vinke from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) has been appointed to the new Advisory Council on Civilian Crisis Prevention and Peacebuilding of the German Federal Government. The new Advisory Board is composed of renowned experts from for instance academia, foundations and non-governmental organisations and comes together this week for the first time. The focus of the Advisory Board is to pool civil society and technical expertise on crisis prevention and peacebuilding and thus to inform the work of the Federal Ministries.

12.12.2018 - More and more rainfall extremes are observed in regions around the globe – triggering both wet and dry records, a new study shows. Yet there are big differences between regions: The central and Eastern US, northern Europe and northern Asia have experienced heavy rainfall events that have led to severe floods in recent past. In contrast, most African regions have seen an increased frequency of months with a lack of rain. The study is the first to systematically analyze and quantify changes in record-breaking monthly rainfall events from all over the globe, based on data from roughly 50,000 weather stations worldwide. Climate change from fossil fuel greenhouse gases has long been expected to disturb rainfall patterns.

23.11.2018 – From Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, to Lima in Peru and New Delhi in India – EPICC kicked off its transnational collaboration with a series of workshops with international government and science officials to strengthen resilience against disruptive weather phenomena and change at national, regional and local levels. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is leading the execution of the East Africa Peru India Climate Capacities (EPICC) project together with its project partners The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, and the German Meteorological Service (DWD) in Hamburg.

31/08/2018 - Together with the Minister for the Environment, Svenja Schulze, and Georg Schütte from the Federal Ministry for Innovation and Research, PIK Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber presented a new policy paper of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). It names four necessary initiatives for fair and timely climate policy.

29/03/2018 - The designated Director and chief economist of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Ottmar Edenhofer, accompanied the new Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on his first visit to the United Nations in New York. Edenhofer was the only guest of the ministerial delegation. Germany seeks a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council in 2019 and 2020. Minister Maas held a number of talks and campaigned for strengthening the United Nations in times of national unilateralist leanings.

19/03/2018 - Climate change is a driver of future migration – in a worst-case scenario, it could force more than 100 million people out of their homes by 2050. This is shown by a groundbreaking Worldbank report, co-authored by scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Subsaharan Africa and Southern Asia are among the most affected regions, to a lesser extent also Latin America. Water scarcity and yield failures are, along with a number of other economical and social factors, becoming more and more relevant for migration within countries. This so-called internal migration is the subject of the report. However, rapid reductions of greenhouse-gas emissions can reduce this future migration by up to 80 percent, according to the report.