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Report on the 1st Workshop on Information Retrieval for Climate Impact (MANILA24) at SIGIR 2024
No full textThe purpose of the MANILA24 Workshop on information retrieval for climate impact was to bring together researchers from academia, industry, governments, and NGOs to identify and discuss core research problems in information retrieval to assess climate change impacts. The workshop aimed to foster collaboration by bringing communities together that have so far not been very well connected - information retrieval, natural language processing, systematic reviews, impact assessments, and climate science. The workshop brought together a diverse set of researchers and practitioners interested in contributing to the development of a technical research agenda for information retrieval to assess climate change impacts.
Date: 18 July 2024.
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ir-for-climate-impact/2024/manila24-workshop-page
Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off target – Continued collective inaction puts global temperature goal at risk
No full textThe sixteenth edition of the Emissions Gap Report finds that global warming projections over this century, based on full implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), are now 2.3-2.5°C, while those based on current policies are 2.8°C. This compares to 2.6-2.8°C and 3.1°C in last year’s report. However, methodological updates account for 0.1°C of the improvement, and the upcoming withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement will cancel another 0.1°C, meaning that the new NDCs themselves have barely moved the needle. Nations remain far from meeting the Paris Agreement goal to limit warming to well-below 2°C, while pursuing efforts to stay below 1.5°C. Reductions to annual emissions of 35 per cent and 55 per cent, compared with 2019 levels, are needed in 2035 to align with the Paris Agreement 2°C and 1.5°C pathways, respectively. Given the size of the cuts needed, the short time available to deliver them and a challenging political climate, a higher exceedance of 1.5°C will happen, very likely within the next decade. The report finds that this overshoot must be limited through faster and bigger reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to minimize climate risks and damages and keep returning to 1.5°C by 2100 within the realms of possibility – although doing so will be extremely challenging. Every fraction of a degree avoided means lower losses for people and ecosystems, lower costs, and less reliance on uncertain carbon dioxide removal techniques to return to 1.5°C by 2100. Since the adoption of the Paris Agreement ten years ago, temperature predictions have fallen from 3-3.5°C. The required low-carbon technologies to deliver big emission cuts are available. Wind and solar energy development is booming, lowering deployment costs. This means the international community can accelerate climate action, should they choose to do so. However, delivering faster cuts requires would require navigating a challenging geopolitical environment, delivering a massive increase in support to developing countries, and redesigning the international financial architecture
How much citizen science does city science need?
No full textThis guest editorial examines the critical but underutilized role of citizen science in urban analytics and city science. The authors argue that despite a decade of discussion about smart cities and technology-enabled urban planning, citizen science remains inadequately integrated into urban research and governance. Drawing on examples like OpenStreetMap, Map Kibera, and various environmental monitoring initiatives, the paper demonstrates how citizen-generated data is already shaping urban policy and amplifying marginalized voices. The authors present citizen science data's notable urban bias, even in biodiversity monitoring, and identify five priority areas for integration: enabling tech-assisted civic participation, empowering inclusive engagement, building purpose-driven alliances, fostering collaborative sense-making, and integrating citizen data into urban reporting frameworks. Using the EU-funded Urban ReLeaf project as a case study—which has engaged over 3,000 participants across six European cities to collect data on air pollution, heat stress, and green infrastructure—the editorial highlights both successes and persistent challenges in implementation. The authors conclude that city science must work with citizens rather than merely for them, recognizing the fundamental reciprocal relationship between cities and their inhabitants in addressing contemporary urban challenges including climate crisis, technological transformation, and political polarization
Bundling measures for food systems transformation: a global, multimodel assessment
No full textBackground: Current food systems leave one in ten individuals at risk of hunger while driving unsustainable environmental impacts. Inaction risks further exacerbating negative impacts on both human and planetary health. These challenges emerge from complex system interactions, requiring approaches that engage with this complexity and consider how transformation measures interact across food systems. We aimed to quantify the magnitude and uncertainty of the impacts of key food systems transformation measures both individually and in a bundle using an ensemble of global economic models.
Methods: In this global multimodel assessment, we applied an ensemble of ten state-of-the-art global economic models to evaluate the potential of four key measures in transforming food systems: increasing agricultural productivity, halving food loss and waste, shifting towards healthier diets, and economy-wide climate mitigation policies aligned with limiting warming to 1·5°C. The scenarios used a middle-of-the-road shared socioeconomic pathway for population and gross domestic product growth, climate impact data from Jägermeyr and colleagues, Thornton and colleagues, and Nelson and colleagues, and dietary targets based on the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, with model simulations conducted from 2020 to 2050. We then assessed the effect of these measures in isolation and in combination in a bundled scenario. To further understand the interactions between these measures, we conducted a decomposition analysis that distinguishes between the individual effects of a measure (effect when implemented alone), total effects (its contribution within the bundle), and interaction effects (the difference between total and individual effects). This approach aimed to show complementarities and trade-offs that emerge when multiple measures are implemented simultaneously.
Findings: Our analysis showed that individual measures in isolation are insufficient to achieve high-level environmental objectives and might generate unintended consequences. In contrast, bundling measures produces co-benefits: avoiding 50% of projected agricultural greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and almost 20% of anticipated land conversion, while moderating food price increases associated with ambitious climate change mitigation policies. Our decomposition analysis further shows that measures can have varying effects across different dimensions. Although dietary shifts and climate mitigation policies are the largest drivers of environmental benefits (each contributing to a median decline of >10 percentage points in non-CO2 emissions and 5 percentage points in agricultural land use globally), productivity improvements and reducing food loss and waste play essential roles in moderating price increases (each contributing to a median decline of >5 percentage points in average prices).
Interpretation: This study highlights the importance of implementing coordinated approaches to food system transformation and climate change mitigation rather than relying on isolated interventions. Comprehensive transformation requires understanding how supply-side and demand-side changes can interact with climate mitigation policies, enabling policy makers to design intervention packages that maximise benefits while minimising trade-offs across environmental, economic, and social dimensions
Integrative Sustainable Development Goal policy portfolios to accelerate global progress towards a more sustainable future: a modelling study
No full textBackground: Progress towards the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is far off track. An effective and comprehensive assessment of policy impacts on the SDGs is crucial for accelerating global progress towards their achievement. We aimed to provide a comprehensive assessment of progress towards ten SDGs under future deep uncertainties and identify the most effective policy portfolios that best achieve these SDGs simultaneously.
Methods: In this study, we used an integrative modelling approach to capture important aspects of the complex behaviours of the global environmental and socioeconomic system. The study was conducted based on the functional enviro-economic linkages integrated nexus model, which is a system dynamics model that simulates interdependencies among global social, economic, and environmental components across 12 sectoral modules, including population, education, economy, poverty, energy, land use, water, food and diet change, fertiliser use, climate, carbon cycle, and biodiversity. The model was constructed with historical data from 1950 to 2021, sourced primarily from official international organisations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We used 32 SDG assessment indicators to quantify the impacts of 6480 policy portfolios from seven policy clusters interactively on ten SDGs up until 2050. We then used a multiobjective sorting and ranking method to identify robust policy portfolios that most effectively accelerate progress towards the ten SDGs simultaneously across five future socioeconomic pathways.
Findings: Although single-sector policies can boost progress towards the SDGs, multisectoral policy portfolios consisting of complementary policies from different sectors are required to achieve societal, economic, and environmental goals, and to capitalise on synergies and minimise undesirable trade-offs amongst SDGs. The policy portfolios play a more important role than more general socioeconomic development pathways in accelerating progress towards the SDGs. Two robust policy portfolios composed of seven policies, including ambitious education, energy supply decarbonisation, crop yield increase, sustainable water use, high nitrogen use efficiency, healthy and sustainable dietary change, and climate change mitigation with careful consideration of ecosystem impacts, were the most effective for global sustainable transformations regardless of future uncertainties, effecting up to a 19·6% to 29·5% improvement in overall progress towards the ten SDGs by 2050 compared with a reference policy portfolio without additional policies taken.
Interpretation: Greater progress towards multiple SDGs can be made through more ambitious policies and their more integrated implementation. Our robust policy portfolios provide general transformation directions for the international community to take coordinated and coherent actions to accelerate progress towards the SDGs
Global Carbon Budget 2025
No full textAccurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesise datasets and methodologies to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFOS) are based on energy statistics and cement production data. Emissions from land-use change (ELUC) are estimated by bookkeeping models based on land-use and land-use change data. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured at surface stations, and the global atmospheric CO2 growth rate (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The global net uptake of CO2 by the ocean (SOCEAN, called the ocean sink) is estimated with global ocean biogeochemistry models and observation-based fCO2-products. The global net uptake of CO2 by the land (SLAND, called the land sink) is estimated with dynamic global vegetation models. Additional lines of evidence on land and ocean sinks are provided by atmospheric inversions, atmospheric oxygen measurements, ocean interior observation-based estimates, and Earth System Models. The sum of all sources and sinks results in the carbon budget imbalance (BIM), a measure of imperfect data and incomplete understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ.
For the year 2024, EFOS increased by 1.1 % relative to 2023, with fossil emissions at 10.3 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1 (including the cement carbonation sink, 0.2 GtC/yr), ELUC was 1.3 ± 0.7 GtC yr−1, for total anthropogenic CO2 emissions of 11.6 ± 0.9 GtC yr−1 (42.4 ± 3.2 GtCO2 yr−1). Also, for 2024, GATM was 7.9 ± 0.2 GtC yr−1 (3.73 ± 0.1 ppm yr−1), 2.2 GtC above the 2023 growth rate. SOCEAN was 3.4 ± 0.4 GtC yr−1 and SLAND was 1.9 ± 1.1 GtC yr−1, leaving a large negative BIM (−1.7 GtC yr−1), suggesting that the total sink or GATM is strongly overestimated in 2024. The global atmospheric CO2 concentration averaged over 2024 reached 422.8 ± 0.1 ppm. Preliminary data for 2025 suggest an increase in EFOS relative to 2024 of +1.1 % (0.2 % to 2.2 %) globally, and atmospheric CO2 concentration increasing by 2.3 ppm reaching 425.7 ppm, 52 % above the pre-industrial level (around 278 ppm in 1750). Overall, the mean and trend in the components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2024, with a near-zero overall budget imbalance, although discrepancies of up to around 1 GtC yr−1 persist for the representation of annual to decadal variability in CO2 fluxes. Comparison of estimates from multiple approaches and observations shows: (1) a persistent large uncertainty in the estimate of land-use change emissions, (2) a low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) a discrepancy between the different methods on the mean ocean sink.
This living data update documents changes in methods and datasets applied to this most-recent global carbon budget as well as evolving community understanding of the global carbon cycle. The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2025 (Friedlingstein et al., 2025c)
Pathways to an integrated understanding of marine environments and ecosystems in the Asia-Pacific Region
No full textThe Asia-Pacific Region (APR) encompasses a vast geographical area rich in marine biodiversity that plays critical roles in global ecological stability and climate regulation, but it also faces daunting challenges in maintaining these roles under global change. Environmental dynamics in the APR manifest regularly over a range of timescales, including storms, earthquakes, floods, and extreme heat events. Further, coastal and marine ecosystems, including extensive commercial fisheries and coral reefs, are under threat from intense resource extraction and increasingly frequent marine heatwaves. Knowledge gaps for understanding these complex systems are aggravated by substantial barriers to cross-national efforts caused by the region’s vast diversity of cultures, languages, socioeconomics, politics, and management practices. Effective management of marine resources in the APR will necessitate multidisciplinary research based on continuous, region-wide observations supported by robust collaborations. In 2023, we gathered APR researchers across disciplines to discuss these issues and find solutions during a thematic seminar and workshop program at Tohoku University in Japan. Based on the results of this program, we present a review of the current state of APR marine ecosystems, raise key questions addressable through multidisciplinary approaches, and identify future priorities for the region. We conclude that sustaining biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and climate resilience in the APR will depend on stronger interdisciplinary collaboration, better integration of biological and geophysical data, and broader access to marine observations. These efforts are both urgent and essential for supporting better science-based policy decisions to address the escalating effects of global change on marine systems across the region
Explicit Methodologies for Normative Evaluation in Public Policy, as Applied to Carbon Budgets
No full textWhat could philosophical or justice perspectives contribute to climate (and other applied philosophy) policy discussions? This question is important for philosophers on government policy committees. This article identifies two novel concerns about such contexts (which I call ‘contingent selection’ and ‘committee deference’) and systematizes some potential methodologies before arguing for a previously unrecognized methodology that focuses on disciplinary convergence. After supporting this methodology by providing several justifications, the Appendix explains how to apply it when evaluating a carbon budget. This methodology and its application are meant to be of interest to both theorists and practitioners
