Swiss Global Change Day 2024
On 10 April 2024, ProClim (Swiss Forum for Climate and Global Change) hosted its 24th Swiss Global Change Day.
Marie-France Loutre (Executive Director) and Chené van Rensburg (Communications and Project Officer) were happy to have the opportunity to represent PAGES at the event, and were impressed by the very interesting talks and excellent posters.
We were also happy to meet and interact with many new faces wanting to know more about the PAGES project, and look forward to hopefully welcoming some new members the PAGES Early-Career Network (ECN).
Talks included:
Thomas Stocker (University of Bern): Why we need an IPCC Special Report on Tipping Points
Thomas shared some insight into the IPCC process and spoke about the need for consensus on Tipping Points, especially in the AR7.
Valentina Bosetti (Bocconi University, Milan): Decarbonization Transition: Navigating the Challenges
Valentina said that "Creating future visions while warning about plausible outcomes creates tensions. We need to be much more realistic in the scenarios we develop for the future" and highlighted the point about intergenerational climate equity.
Sabine Fuss (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin): Cleaning up after ourselves: The role of carbon dioxide removal for reaching the Paris climate goals
Sabine's talk summarized the many Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) options available to us today, and while this is a necessary and important process, she highlighted how this alone cannot get us to meeting targets.
Géraldine Pflieger (University of Geneva): Exchange of experience on COP28
Géraldine provided some insight into what it is like to join the COP meetings as part of the delegation representing Switzerland. She shed light on an average working day at COP28, and presented some of the obvious, and not so obvious, challenges.
Robert Jnglin Wills (ETH Zurich): From global change to regional weather and climate impacts: What we know and remaining uncertainties
After a frustrating technical strike of the projector, Robert recovered well and was able to draw his audience back in to his talk on the biases that climate models (although they have performed well until now) show, and how important it is to remove them.
Nicolas Senn (University of Lausanne): Pathways towards net-zero healthcare systems
Nicolas provided insight into the role healthcare systems can play in reducing carbon emissions, and the areas that should be paid more attention to. He shared his thoughts on what may be needed to achieve transformation in the healthcare sector in achieving decarbonization - and that this may require alternative models of care.
Diana Ürge-Vorsatz (Central European University, Vienna): The built environment: The field of action where the fight against Climate Change will be won or lost.
Diana presented online to the audience and shared some very interesting statistics on how the built environment, cities and urban spaces, can, and should be, very closely looked at in the fight to reaching climate targets. She also highlighted how CO2 emissions from current and ongoing construction are seriously impacting the fight to reach net zero targets, before anyone has even switched a light on inside the buildings. Diana stressed how everything we need to achieve our goals are available to us right now.
Congratulations to Luisa Minich, Lilian Goepp, Nicolas Hartmann and Laure Moinat on winning best posters in their category.
Thank you to the organizers of the #SGCD24 for a successful and highly informative event. We look forward to the opportunity of attending next year again.
> More about #SGCD24
> More about ProClim
> More about SCNAT
