Junior Research Groups Global Change - 4 + 1

Urban risk is a rapidly growing challenge, as it stems from the intersection of two megatrends of global change: urbanization and climate change.

The EmBARK-project will investigate time scales and possible trajectories of socio-economic transformation processes and analyse their relevance as potential barriers to adaptation to climate change.

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.

A major challenge for international climate and energy policies, especially after the climate conferences COP21 and COP22, is curbing global coal consumption to prevent global warming, in the context of a global transformation towards a lower-carbon ...

The global challenge of climate change such as the loss of biodiversity, the increase of water and resource scarcity, demographic change, ‘pose major collective action problems: A group benefits from a certain action, but no individual’.

Minimizing the carbon footprint by renewable resources leads to challenges coming from accompanying changes of the type, amount and location of these. At the same time transformable, modular production concepts of the process industry are currently in ...

Paris has written history. The initiation of a worldwide, internationally binding climate agreement serves as a wake-up call for a rapid transformation of the energy system, especially in African countries. Reframing the goal of a temperature increase ...

Cities are hotspots for global change. Climate change, urbanization and demographic change are affecting urban areas and their residents today and will pose a range of challenges to urban planning in the future.

The unprecedented growth of the new middle classes in middle income developing countries implies a strong growth in both consumption and carbon emissions, particularly if consumption patterns mirror the lifestyles of industrialized countries. The drivers ...

Ambitious mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming well below 2°C, as agreed in the Paris Agreement, requires national climate policies that trigger unprecedented redirection of investments. It is the primary function of the ...

Almost a quarter of the land surface of the northern hemisphere of the earth is characterized by permanently frozen soils. Strong climate warming in the Arctic leads to thawing of permafrost soils, triggering large-scale landscape and ecosystems changes ...

Human activities and associated increasing greenhouse gas emissions have caused simultaneous changes in a range of ocean abiotic parameters.

South American native grasslands are heavily used socio-ecological systems and currently subjected to expanding land use changes by afforestation and by agroindustrial soyabean cultivation for the globalized market. Transnational forest industry and ...

Global change is expected to impact freshwater ecosystems severely, e.g. by prolonged periods of drought, an increasing number of floods, or reduced supply of good quality freshwater. It is thought that streams and rivers are particularly vulnerable to ...

The junior research group examines the connection between global change and local conflicts over land. Current processes of change such as climate change and the crisis of food prices are leading to changes in the use of land worldwide. As a result of ...

The increase in global atmospheric CO2 concentration is caused by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels. The strength of this increase, however, cannot be directly derived from our annual CO2 emissions, and so neither its effect on climate. This is due to ...

Agricultural production does not only provide goods (food, feed, fiber, fuel) to societies, but also drives environmental degradation and climate change, with agriculture being the most important emitter of non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs). The project ...

This inter- and trans-disciplinary research group collaterally funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) and the BMBF (Federal Ministry for Education and Research) investigates the causes and mechanisms of outbreaks of invasive insect pests in urban ...

Lowering the number of people worldwide suffering from hunger is an urgent challenge for the future. Therefore global food security policies endowed with large financial support are designed with focus on smallholders’ resilience in developing ...

Climate change has contributed to an increase in extreme weather events – including devastating heavy rains and dry spells. The increase in frequency and intensity of these events is of key importance to society due to their large impact through ...

Nutrient fluxes by submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) from tropical islands can strongly alter the functionality of adjacent coastal ecosystems. However, these fluxes and their effects were yet assessed mostly by individual locally focused studies. ...

The climatic changes pose an immediate threat to water resources worldwide. One solution for the minimisation of the impact is the compensation of deficits with sustainable strategies.

The majority of the world’s population lives since the turn of the millennium in cities, most of them in developing countries and many in the low elevation coastal zone. Furthermore urban expansion proceeds even faster than population growth. The ...

The research group Cascade Use (CCU) supports the ambition of societal actors towards a reduced resource use and minimizing CO2 emissions in the long-term. The members of the research group are developing and testing a key assessment tool. The ...

Dynamics and stability of “nature” and “society” as two considerably complex systems have mostly been studied separately so far. This viewpoint has widely ignored the existing complex interdependences between climate, ecology and socio-economy, ...

Modern industrialized societies rely to a large extent on the availability and the use of energy. The complex systems to produce energy are among the central and most important infrastructures of modern societies. Their structures and cultures rely to a ...

Shifts in large-scale circulation patterns can strongly alter the frequency and/or intensity of extremes and can thus have severe humanitarian impacts. Climate change over the last century has already altered some large scale circulation patterns but the ...

Climate change and migration are drawing increasing interest from researchers and policy makers, as well as from the general public. Much attention has been given to climate change as a push factor contributing to migration, and to the potential ...

The Pacific Islands are a region where societies are closely linked to the coral reef ecosystems surrounding them. At the same time, the region’s reefs are strongly threatened by global environmental and socio-economic changes. The close ...

Elevated atmospheric deposition rates of reactive nitrogen (Nr) through intensive farming, traffic and industry have led to serious concerns regarding alterations in ecosystem functioning, plant health, and water quality. Although large efforts have been ...

The biodiversity hotspot of southeast Asia is threatened by the continuous anthropogenic loss of remaining natural habitats. Two global initiatives (REDD+ [Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation] and timber certification by the ...