University of Technology Sydney & German Aerospace Center | Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement Goals

A state-of-the-art climate model, released by the prestigious scientific publisher Springer Nature, offers a roadmap for meeting -- and surpassing -- the targets set by the Paris Climate Agreement, showing that we can solve the global climate crisis with currently available technologies and natural climate solutions. The book, entitled Achieving the Paris Climate Agreement, was the culmination of a two-year collaboration with 17 leading scientists at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), two institutes at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and the University of Melbourne’s Climate & Energy College. 

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C  (SR1.5) released October 2018, the Earth must be kept below the dangerous threshold of 1.5°C in global average temperature rise above pre-industrial levels if we are to avoid a worsening of climate-related impacts. We are already seeing the devastating consequences of the current 1°C global temperature increase, including rising sea levels in many coastal cities, extreme storms, prolonged droughts, and intensified wildfires.

The impacts resulting from a higher 2°C level are almost unimaginable—the death of the coral reefs in every ocean, the collapse of nearly one-quarter of the world’s agricultural land, dramatically increased heat waves and wildfires, 100 million people driven to extreme poverty sparking multiple refugee crises, 1 meter of sea level rise in some regions, and more than $11 trillion per year in damages from extreme storms and flooding. Stacked upon each other, these impacts and many more, could undermine the very fabric of life on our planet, greatly challenging the continuation of human civilization as we currently know it. Read more about the climate model here.