Challenges of Overshoot for the Research Community

Knowledge. Information. Regionalization.

With the world talking about UNEP’s spotlight report on “Limiting overshoot”, what next for the research community?

The climate research community has long recognized and studied overshoot scenarios, tipping points and irreversibility, and grappled with deep uncertainty. The world’s actual pathway into the future remains undetermined. Given that we will be living in an overshoot reality, regional climate information becomes a different challenge to anticipate and respond to. All over the world consequential decisions are being made at the regional scale, without serious consideration of the path-dependencies of our emerging trajectory.

We take the UNEP “Limiting overshoot” Report as a catalyst to discuss how we can innovate our research designs to better-inform agile (regional, anticipatory, and flexible) mitigation and adaptation efforts, with information for ever-evolving conditions.

The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Regional Information for Society (RIfS) Core Project will convene two online fora for the climate research community, anchored by panel discussions :

• the week of the Sept 28th: tentative title “Lived Experience: Trajectories and Consequences”
• the week of Oct 14th: tentative title “Navigating the Return: Mitigation and Adaptation Challenges”