Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook
Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2024
Many countries, communities, and social actors around the world are struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change. Adapting to climate change in a sustainable manner involves a huge collective effort and is barely happening. How can sustainable climate change adaptation become plausible? The Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2024 provides a unique systematic and global assessment of the context conditions for sustainable climate change adaptation, evaluating the social dynamics of deep decarbonization and the physical dynamics in regional climate variability and extremes. Through nine case studies across the globe, the assessment provides insights into key barriers and opportunities for sustainable climate change adaptation.
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Key findings in a nutshell
Reaching net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 is currently not plausible. Especially corporate responses, consumption trends, and the lack of effective fossil-fuel divestment inhibit deep decarbonization.
Many social drivers support decarbonization, but lack a decisive turning point.
Long-term climate change and internal climate variability together can lead to ecosystem and socioeconomic disruptions with potentially devastating consequences.
Sustainable and climate change adaptation is urgent. But so far, coping and incremental responses predominate.
A more inclusive and connected repertoire of climate action is needed:
- Work across sectors and scales to improve preparedness for the impacts of climate change.
- Integrate diverse knowledges for just climate action.
- Use political, legal, and financial pressure to phase out fossil fuel
Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023
In the “Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023”, the Cluster of Excellence CLICCS delivers the proof: it is currently not plausible – that is, it can’t be realistically expected – that global warming will be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Further, based on an analysis of physical processes broadly considered to represent potential tipping points, CLICCS shows that social transformation is currently more important than these tipping points.
Drawing on an assessment framework of its own design, the Cluster has identified ten key social drivers that could support the shift away from fossil energies. At the moment, none of these drivers support deep decarbonization by 2050. The development of this framework, the first of its kind for social dynamics, resulted in the creation of a Mercator Foundation professorship, effectively establishing a new field of research on the social plausibility of climate futures.
Key Findings in a nutshell
→ Meeting the 1.5°C Paris Agreement temperature goal is not plausible. Limiting the global temperature rise to well below 2°C can become plausible if ambition, implementation, and knowledge gaps are closed.
- None of the ten social drivers support deep decarbonization by 2050. The drivers corporate responses and consumption patterns continue to undermine the pathways to decarbonization, let alone deep decarbonization.
- The physical processes permafrost thaw, AMOC instability, and Amazon Forest dieback can moderately inhibit the plausibility of attaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals.
- The social driver assessments demonstrate that human agency has a large potential to shape the way climate futures will evolve.
However, human agency is strongly shaped by injustices and social inequalities, which inhibit social dynamics toward deep decarbonization by 2050. - Key concepts and guiding principles toward a Sustainable Adaptation Plausibility Framework are established.