• Energy Research

Deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit future global temperature increases to 1·5°C above pre-industrial levels, but current progress is inadequate to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and to reduce future risks from climate change. Many actions to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions can also deliver near-term health co-benefits, for example from reduced air pollution, consumption of healthy diets, and increased physical activity. High-quality evidence on the type and magnitude of co-benefits that can be realised and improved knowledge of how to promote the implementation of such actions can support progress towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Lancet Pathfinder Commission was established to collate and assess the evidence on the near-term health effects of greenhouse gas mitigation, including both modelling studies and evaluated implemented actions. The Commission's aim is to assess the potential and achieved magnitude of the benefits for health and climate of different mitigation actions and, where possible, the factors facilitating or impeding implementation.

Abstract. To manage Earth in the Anthropocene, new tools, new institutions, and new forms of international cooperation will be required. Earth Virtualization Engines is proposed as an international federation of centers of excellence to empower all people to respond to the immense and urgent challenges posed by climate change.

A United Nations conference seeks urban sustainability. But the agenda will fail without input from researchers, warn Timon McPhearson and colleagues.

This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report. It includes the complete text of this chapter’s Executive Summary. The paper highlights the limits to what adaptation can do to protect urban areas and their economies and populations without the needed global agreement and action on mitigation; this is the case even for cities with high adaptive capacities. It ends with a discussion of transformative adaptation and where learning on how to achieve this needs to come from.

AbstractThere is a growing recognition that responding to climate change necessitates urban adaptation. We sketch a transdisciplinary research effort, arguing that actionable research on urban adaptation needs to recognize the nature of cities as social networks embedded in physical space. Given the pace, scale and socioeconomic outcomes of urbanization in the Global South, the specificities and history of its cities must be central to the study of how well-known agglomeration effects can facilitate adaptation. The proposed effort calls for the co-creation of knowledge involving scientists and stakeholders, especially those historically excluded from the design and implementation of urban development policies.