COP26

Numerous festival discussions are available on-demand and showcase COP26 relevant research and work carried out across Cambridge and its wider global community. Here we highlight three of the many available discussions and signpost other events occurring across the Cambridge community.

In association with the COP26 Universities Network, a new paper from a group of UK University Students including multiple Cambridge authors urges policymakers to look beyond the horizon of 2050 and consider policies' impacts across future generations' lifetimes.

If you want policymakers to ‘get’ climate risk, link the hazard you research to concerns they already understand. These could be issues like jobs, economic growth, or national security.

Insights from psychology and neuroscience suggest individuals engage with a risk most effectively when it speaks to their ‘inner elephant’: the part of the brain responsible for our intuitive, automatic thinking.

AU4DM is a community of researchers and professionals from policy, industry, and academia, seeking to improve decision-making under uncertainty. The core of our work is decision science. At the same time, we have discovered the value of sparkling interdisciplinary collaboration across the social sciences and arts and humanities. On 1 October 2021, AU4DM teamed up with Climate Action Unit to host a special workshop on Communicating Climate Risk, supported by Cambridge Zero and the COP26 Universities network.

Global cities share recommendations on how to strengthen urban resilience and embed adaptation into wider city processes and systems

Increasingly frequent and destructive extreme weather and climate events are already tearing apart the socio-economic fabric of our civilisation. A look at extreme event attribution in humanitarian, financial and legal contexts.

Preparedness and response to compound dry-hot extreme events. What is being done? What more is needed? A roadmap to reduce impacts, based on scientific evidence and professional experience, aimed at empowering individuals and communities.

Tipping Points are critical thresholds beyond which a system reorganizes, often abruptly and/or irreversibly. The probability of crossing such critical thresholds in the climate system may be low, but the impacts of triggering a tipping point could be catastrophic and far-reaching.

Expert panellists identify the need for interdisciplinary action and improved modelling tools to help reduce public scepticism in future coastal flood hazard assessments.

Risk cascades from climate impacts are severe, already occurring and must be incorporated into risk assessments. While predicting such chain reactions is difficult, building resilience against them fortuitously means reducing inequalities

A new paper by leading UK scientists sets out key solutions and policy actions that should be implemented now, as well as priority research areas for the next decade, if the UK is to reach its net zero target by 2050.