“The task of climate science is understanding the world for informing the decision makers that try to transform the world towards sustainability,” Schellnhuber pointed out. It is up to the policy makers though, he said, to design the transformation.
One focus this year was on adaptation research at PIK. Global supply chains and infrastructure were at the center of Anders Levermann’s talk – “hitting society where it hurts,” as he called it. Diego Rybski outlined ways towards generalizable damage approaches. The social dimensions were highlighted by Torsten Grothman, looking at adaptive capacities and adaptation barriers. Strengths of PIK models in a regional adaptation study in northern China were presented, as well as PIK work in the upper Niger area in western Africa – and these are just a few examples.
Most of the 300 researchers now at PIK, as well as guest scientists, participated in the meeting that took one and a half days. The strong growth of the institute in the past few years makes it important once a year to present to each other the manifold scientific activities going on at the institute – and to debate the challenges ahead.
