Loss and damage and litigation were the subject of special talks and a panel debate combining natural and social sciences, from the attribution of extreme weather impacts to the social costs of carbon. Legal expert
Dr. Roda Verheyen from Hamburg gave a guest input – she’s the lawyer who successfully fought the case resulting in the historic German constitutional court ruling on climate protection. She highlighted that it is really the science of institutions such as PIK that is essential for any successful climate litigation.
Scientists from all PIK Research Departments and FutureLabs presented on subjects as diverse as the difficulties of degrowth in food systems and preventing hurricane-induced outages in the power grid of Texas or what kind of forests are most resilient to climate change. In addition, colleagues from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) gave talks on subjects such as machine learning assisted policy evaluation that are complementary to PIK research.
Both Directors, climate economist Ottmar Edenhofer and natural scientist Johan Rockström, congratulated all researchers and staff for an outstanding performance in the past year. Scientists used the Research Days to present promising new projects. PIK research will, the Directors stated, not just discuss different states of equilibrium, but provide pathways to actually transition to a new, sustainable equilibrium.
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