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Truly understanding climate-related disaster risk, and the management of that risk, can inform effective action on climate adaptation and the loss and damage mechanism, the main vehicle under the UN Climate Convention for dealing with climate-related effects, including residual impacts after adaptation.
Effective mitigation of climate change requires investment flows to be redirected from high- to low-carbon technologies. However, especially in developing countries, low-carbon investments often suffer from high risks. More research is needed to address these risks and allow sound policy decisions to be made.
The recent slowdown (or 'pause') in global surface temperature rise is a hot topic for climate scientists and the wider public. We discuss how climate scientists have tried to communicate the pause and suggest that 'many-to-many' communication offers a key opportunity to directly engage with the public.
It is time to acknowledge that global average temperatures are likely to rise above the 2 °C policy target and consider how that deeply troubling prospect should affect priorities for communicating and managing the risks of a dangerously warming climate.
Observational data show a continued increase of hot extremes over land during the so-called global warming hiatus. This tendency is greater for the most extreme events and thus more relevant for impacts than changes in global mean temperature.
Increasing use of regionally and globally oriented impacts studies, coordinated across international modelling groups, promises to bring about a new era in climate impacts research. Coordinated cycles of model improvement and projection are needed to make the most of this potential.
