UN IPCC 1.5 degree report draws upon research developed by Future Earth’s community

Published today, the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a sobering assessment that impacts on societies and ecosystems will be significantly more severe at 2°C than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. According to the IPCC, limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, but could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society.

Ninety-one authors and review editors from 40 countries prepared the IPCC report, including members of Future Earth Global Research Projects and Knowledge-Action Networks.

Future Earth’s co-designed Exponential Climate Action Roadmap report, launched on September 10, 2018, offers a timely reminder that there are solutions available to take action. The IPCC report also emphasizes the need to halve global emissions every decade, and the 2017 publication, "A roadmap for rapid decarbonization" (Johan Rockstrom, Owen Gaffney) is referenced in several chapters of the report.

“The IPCC report makes it clear that we need to halve carbon emissions by 2030 or faster to limit risk for dangerous climate change for humanity,” according to Johan Falk, co-lead author of the Exponential Climate Action Roadmap and Senior Innovation Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Future Earth. “We now need leading companies, industries, cities, nations and individuals to set the target to halve emissions combined with powerful policies to scale-out solutions exponentially.”

Also crucial to the gathering of data on emissions is the Global Carbon Project, a Global Research Project of Future Earth. It was formed to work with the international science community to establish a common and mutually agreed knowledge base to support policy debate and action to slow down and ultimately stop the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Kristie L. Ebi, co-chair of the Future Earth Health Knowledge-Action Network and a professor of public health at the University of Washington, is one of the lead authors of the report’s chapter on climate impacts. She has been quoted in the New York Times in response to the report.

For more about the IPCC 1.5 degree report:

The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C