Influence from beneficiaries and stakeholders are driving strategic shifts towards climate priorities, but investments face some operational hurdles.

While atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are higher than ever before, an estimated 2.5 billion additional people are expected to integrate into urban areas worldwide by 2050, making reduced urban CO2 emissions a priority. A group of scientists investigated the effects of urban form, specifically at the building and street level, on urban carbon emissions using detailed assessment methods in three different U.S. cities. The results demonstrate that the relationship between urban form and CO2 emissions is complex and dynamic. Patterns could be different depending on the context and factors such as climatic conditions and size and function of the city. This means that one-size-fits-all approaches cannot be applied to determine optimized urban forms.

At the end of the last global ice age, the deep-frozen Earth reached a built-in limit of climate change and thawed into a slushy planet. Results from a Virginia Tech-led study provide the first direct geochemical evidence of the slushy planet — otherwise known as the “plumeworld ocean” era — when sky-high carbon dioxide levels forced the frozen Earth into a massive, rapid melting period.

Overuse of water resources in Brazil’s main agricultural frontier region, in conjunction with climate change, is reducing replenishment of the Urucuia aquifer and surface water bodies in the basin of a tributary of the São Francisco, the largest river  in the Northeast. 

Sustainable lifestyles, green-tech innovation, and government-led transformation each offer promising routes to make significant progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement, according to a new study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), to which IIASA scientists contributed.