Climate change: science, responses and research needs

Valérie Masson-Delmotte is a climatologist at the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment (LSCE) and a research director at the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). She has been Co-Chair of the IPCC Working Group I for its 6th assessment cycle since being elected in 2015. She has served on numerous national and international projects in addition to the IPCC, including serving as a member of the French Research Strategic Council since 2014. She has published extensively, including several books for the general public, as well as books for children.

Jim Skea is Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London with research interests in energy, climate change and technological innovation. He is currently Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group III for the 6th assessment cycle. He was Research Director of the UK Energy Research Centre 2004-12 and Director of the Policy Studies Institute 1998-2004. He has operated at the interface between research, policy-making and business throughout his career. He was a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change from its inception in 2008 until 2018. From 2018 to 2021 he chaired the first phase of the Scottish Just Transition Commission which made recommendations on how to make a fair and equitable transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland. He was re-appointed as Chair for the second phase in 2021. Until June 2017, he was President of the UK Energy Institute. He was awarded a CBE for services to sustainable energy in 2013 and an OBE for services to sustainable transport in 2004.

Professor Hans-O. Pörtner received his PhD and habilitated in Animal Physiology at Münster and Düsseldorf Universities. As a Research and then Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Council he worked at Dalhousie and Acadia Universities, Nova Scotia, Canada and at the Lovelace Medical Foundation, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, before he became Professor and Head of Integrative Ecophysiology at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Bremerhaven, Germany. He has established theory and evidence on effects of climate warming, ocean acidification, and hypoxia on marine animals and ecosystems. His efforts focus on linking biogeography and ecosystem functioning to molecular, biochemical and physiological mechanisms shaping organism tolerance and performance. After his earlier contributions (as Lead Author and Coordinating Lead Author) to the 4th and 5th assessment cycles of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) he was elected Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II for AR6 in October 2015. He is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences, the German Advisory Council on Global Change and a Web of Science/Clarivate Analytics highly cited researcher (top 1% Cross-Field) 2018 onward.

Dr Joeri Rogelj is Director of Research of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. He is also affiliated with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. He explores how societies can transform towards more sustainable futures connecting Earth system sciences to the study of societal change and policy.
He has published on the effectiveness of international climate agreements such as the Paris Agreement, carbon budgets, net zero emission targets, 1.5°C pathways, and the interaction between climate and sustainable development. 

Dr Rogelj is a long-serving lead author on the annual Emissions Gap Reports by the UN Environment Programme, and coordinated the mitigation pathways assessment for the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C. More recently, he served as a Lead Author on the IPCC’s 2021 Sixth Assessment Report. Since 2022, he is a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. 

Professor Pierre Friedlingstein, Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit recipient, holds a Chair in Mathematical Modelling of the Climate System at the University of Exeter and is also Directeur de Recherche at the Laboratoire de Météorologie dynamique (LMD), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France. He has 30 years research experience in the field of global carbon cycle modelling, global biogeochemical cycles and global climate change. He received the Alexander von Humbold Research award in 2019, the Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2020, and was ranked 3rd in the Reuters list of the world’s top climate scientists in 2021. He is an international leader in the understanding of the feedbacks between the carbon cycle and the climate system. He pioneered research on coupling between climate change and the carbon cycle, developing an original climate-carbon cycle feedback mathematical framework. Over the last decade, he leads several international activities, in particular the Coupled Climate Carbon Cycle Model Intercomparison Project (C4MIP), and more recently, the Global Carbon Budget, an effort that provides reliable carbon cycle information to assist international climate policy. He is member of the Joint Science Committee of the World Climate Research Programme and lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th and 5th assessment reports. 

I am professor of Climate Science at the University of Reading Department of Meteorology. My research is driven by the fundamental question: how much will Earth warm in the current century and what are the implications for the global water cycle, upon which societies and ecosystems depend? I use Earth Observation data to explore fluctuations in clouds, water vapour, rainfall and the Earth's radiative energy balance and use this information to assess the realism of climate prediction models and improve our understanding of the climate system. I am a lead author on the Water Cycle Changes chapter of the IPCC AR6 Working Group 1 report.

Andy Challinor is a Professor of Climate Impacts and leader and founding member of the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Leeds. He develops and uses crop models together with climate models to create strategies for managing risk and adapting food systems to climate change. He leads one of the three themes of GCRF-Africap, a £9M project focusing on capacity building and policy; and is funded by the CGIAR, through the ClimBeR Initiative (Building Systemic Resilience Against Climate Variability and Extremes). Work on crop breeding for nutrition security is funded by the BBSRC, and work on remote sensing and moodelling for early warning is funded by the EU. 

Andy has written and edited for IPCC WG2 and the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA). And is Specialty Chief Editor of the Climate-Smart Food Systems section of Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.

Jo House is an Associate Professor in Climate Change Science and Policy at University of Bristol.  Her main area of expertise is emissions of carbon dioxide from land use change (e.g. deforestation), and land-based mitigation (e.g. afforestation, bioenergy).  She spent a year in the UK Government Office for Science as Head of Climate Advice, is founding Co-Chair of the Bristol Advisory Committee on Climate Change, and advises UK Government, Local Authorities, the EU and various NGOs e.g. National Farmers Union. She is author of many IPCC reports including the Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019), methodologies for greenhouse gas inventories (2019 revision), and the 6th Assessment Report (2022). 

Lindsay C. Stringer is Professor in Environment and Development at the University of York. She has a long-established track record of interdisciplinary research on the human and environmental aspects of climate change, land degradation, biodiversity conservation and international development, with particular emphasis on livelihoods, adaptation, equity and policy. Lindsay has published more than 170 peer reviewed journal papers and was previously a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder, as well as winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Lindsay was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land, and for AR6, in chapter 8: Poverty, Livelihoods and Sustainable Development. She was a coordinating lead author for the AR6 cross-chapter paper on deserts, semi-arid areas and desertification. She was previously a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Africa Regional Assessment.

Friederike (Fredi) is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, one of Imperial's six hubs for research, innovation, and influence on global challenges. Fredi is a physicist with a doctorate in philosophy of science from the Free University Berlin. She joined the University of Oxford in the same year and was associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford before joining Imperial in October 2021. Her main research interests include extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves and storms, and understanding whether and to what extent these are made more likely or intense due to climate change - known by experts as 'climate change attribution'. In 2018, Fredi became one of the international climate scientists writing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) The Scientific Basis, which was published in August 2021. She is also an author on the IPCC's new Synthesis Report which will be published in September 2022. In 2020 Climate Change Attribution was named one of MIT Tech Review's top ten breakthrough technologies. In 2021 Fredi was recognised for her co-founding of WWA on the TIME100 list as one of the world’s most influential individuals, according to the renowned TIME magazine and as one of the top 10 people who made a difference in science in 2021, by the journal Nature.

Rachel Warren, Professor of Global Change and Environmental Biology at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Angila, is an interdisciplinary synthesist with over 20 years’ experience leading national/international teams to deliver policy relevant science on climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainability.  She was a coordinating lead author of the 5th (2014) assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lead author in the 4th and 6th assessments, the Special Report on 1.5°C warming, and the recent UNEP Making Peace with Nature report. Her contributions to these reports have informed world governments about the accrual of climate change risk with increasing levels of global warming, and the benefits of limiting warming to 1.5C, especially for biodiversity. Warren has 100 peer reviewed publications including nine in Nature/Science, with >18,000 Google Scholar citations. She works closely with the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the UK Climate Change Committee. Moody’s used her work to inspire the largest pension fund in the world to decarbonise.   

Thomas Bauska is an ice core scientist and isotope geochemist who specializes in reconstructing past changes in greenhouse gases from polar ice. The overarching goal of his research is to use the climate and carbon cycle variability of the past to inform projections of the future. He holds a B.S. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Geology from Oregon State University. After a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, he joined the British Antarctic Survey as the Royal Society University Research Fellow where he recently established a laboratory focused on novel methods of ice core gas analysis.

Dr Celia Martin-Puertas is a Lecturer in Physical Geography at Royal Holloway University of London and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow (2017-2021). She is a palaeoclimatologist working with annually laminated lake sediments (varves) and uses them as a record of past climate variability. Celia is interested in the evolution of atmospheric dynamics that control meteorological variables in the North Atlantic and European sectors during the present interglacial period, the last 11,700 years. 

Reconstructing interannual to decadal climate variability over thousands of years helps to better understand mechanisms behind extreme weather events such as floods or heat waves as well as the response of the Earth’s climate system to external climate forcing (e.g., solar activity, volcanic eruptions, ice melting, and green house gasses).  Celia’s research is based on a co-production approach between palaeoclimatologists, meteorological organisations, and policy makers to better connect (palaeo) climate data with information required by stakeholders / policy makers for responses to climate change.

Chris is interested in the dynamics of the Earth’s climate system. His research broadly focuses on understanding mechanisms of climate variability and change, as well as the predictability of future climate, across a range of timescales.

He studied for an undergraduate degree and a PhD at Imperial College London. He has since held postdoctoral research positions at Hokkaido University (in Japan) and the University of Oxford.

He is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow based at the Department of Meteorology, University of Reading.

Corwin Wright is a Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the Centre for Space, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Bath.

His current research programme focuses on the study of atmospheric coupling via gravity waves. These waves are a critical mechanism for momentum and energy transport in the atmosphere, and are vitally important to accurate weather and climate forecasting.

Before his Research Fellowship, he was a research officer at the university of Bath, and holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Martin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antarctic Ice Sheet modelling at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on using numerical models and geophysical observations to improve our understanding of the dynamics of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential future contribution to sea-level. 

After completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge and British Antarctic Survey in 2016, he spent 3 years as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA. During this time, he participated in Antarctic fieldwork spending two months as part of a team performing an airborne survey of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Dr Melanie Roffet-Salque’s PhD and post-doctoral research at the University of Bristol involved investigating the emergence of dairying practices in Neolithic Europe. She studied lipid biomarker and stable carbon isotope compositions of food residues from pottery containers. Melanie was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2018 to develop a novel palaeoclimate proxy using hydrogen isotope records from animal fats preserved in archaeological and historical artefacts. She is a proleptic lecturer in Environmental Chemistry at University of Bristol since 2022. 

Melanie’s research is highly interdisciplinary but has analytical chemistry and the environment at its core. She has a deep interest in humans in the past and their relationships to the environments in which they lived.

Phil Mannion is a Royal Society URF and Associate Professor in Palaeobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences, University College London. His research utilizes the fossil record of terrestrial vertebrates to better constrain the responses of species to global climatic change, incorporating outputs from palaeoclimate models. In addition to using the past to contextualize present-day responses, his research also combines past and present-day records of extant vertebrates and their associated environmental parameters into species distribution models, which are a key tool for forecasting future distributions of species under different climatic scenarios. This combined approach captures information on the distribution of a species prior to anthropogenic disturbances, providing a closer approximation of the fundamental ecological niche of a species, with implications for conservation and rewilding programmes.

Edward Gryspeerdt is a URF at the Grantham Institute and Department of Physics at Imperial College London, having previously worked at the Universities of Leipzig and Oxford. His research focuses on understanding the processes that control the properties of clouds, how these are influenced by human activity and the impact on the climate system, using a variety of models and observational data.

Dr Carly Reddington is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Climate and Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds. Carly’s research fellow position is supported by a gift from AIA Group Ltd as part of the Air Quality in Asia Project. Carly’s primary research interest is to investigate how air pollutant emissions change the composition of the atmosphere, degrade regional air quality, and effect public health. She is passionate about conducting research that has an impact beyond the scientific community and can be used to inform policy and practice. Carly is currently using computer models of the atmosphere and earth system to examine the effects of future climate-change and air pollution mitigation policies on public exposure and health in China and globally.

Rupert Stuart-Smith is a Research Associate in Climate Science and the Law at the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme. His present research interests cover the use and interpretation of climate science evidence in litigation and methodological developments in climate change attribution science. His current work also spans climate and glacier modelling, the impacts of climate change on health and strategy development for climate litigation.

Rupert's recent publications include research on the impact of climate change on glacial retreat in Peru in the context of an ongoing lawsuit (Lliuya v RWE) and the evidence needed to bring successful legal claims on the impacts of climate change. His research has been published in leading scientific journals including Nature Geoscience and Nature Climate Change.

Simon joined the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in May 2019. He is working as a Research Officer on central banking and financial supervision in the context of climate change and sustainable finance, exploring the overarching question of how central banks and financial supervisors can respond to downside risks facing the financial sector.

Simon holds a PhD in Economics from SOAS University of London on ‘Central Banking and Economic Development’.

Dr. Anne Larigauderie is the founding Executive Secretary of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, established by Governments in 2012. She has occupied this position since 2014 when the IPBES secretariat opened in Bonn, hosted by the Government of Germany.

Anne was born and raised in Bourges, France, and studied in the cities of Tours, Toulouse and Montpellier. She received her PhD in plant ecology, from the Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc and Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Montpellier, France. 

She spent the first part of her career as a research scientist, working on the impact of climate change on plant physiology and ecology in various ecosystems across several continents. Anne performed research at UC Davis, San Diego State University, Duke University and at the Uni-Basel Institute of Botany working, among others, on the arctic tundra in Alaska, the annual grassland in California, and alpine plant communities in Switzerland.

She then occupied several positions at the interface between science and policy.  She is the former Executive Director of DIVERSITAS, the international programme dedicated to biodiversity science, which became in 2015, a component of the Future Earth programme for global sustainability.

In 2010, she was made “Chevalier dans l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur” and in 2021, “Officier dans l’Ordre national de la Légion d’Honneur”, by the Minister of Education and Research of France. 

Camille Parmesan is Director of Research at the CNRS Station for Experimental and Theoretical Ecology (SETE, in Moulis, France) as a French "Make Our Planet Great Again" Laureate.  Her research focuses on the impacts of climate change on wild plants and animals and spans from field-based work on butterflies to synthetic analyses of global impacts on a broad range of species across terrestrial and marine biomes. She has also authored numerous assessments of impacts of climate change on agricultural pests and on human health, through changes in disease risk.  Her 2003 paper in Nature was ranked the most highly cited paper in Climate Change (Carbon Brief, 2015).  Her scientific awards include being the 2nd highest-cited author in "climate change" (T Reuters) and being named the "2013 Distinguished Scientist" by Texas Academy of Sciences. She has been elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.  She received the Conservation Achievement Award by the National Wildlife Federation and was named "Outstanding Woman Working on Climate Change," by IUCN. She has worked with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for >20 years, and is an official Contributor to IPCC's Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.  She is currently a Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report.  She also has affiliations with the University of Plymouth (UK) and the University of Texas at Austin (USA).  

Piers Forster is the founding Director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate and Professor of Physical Climate Change at the University of Leeds. He researchers the causes of climate change, climate feedbacks and mitigation strategies. He has played leading roles authoring Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, including acting as Lead Author for the IPCC Special Report  on 1.5°C and Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC 6th Assessment Report, published in August 2021. He has sat on the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee since 2018, acting as independent advisor to the UK Government on its climate targets.

Gabriele Hegerl is professor of climate system science at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to coming to Edinburgh, she has been at the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, and the University of Washington, Texas A&M and Duke University in the US. Her research focuses on understanding the causes of climate change and using observations to constrain predictions of future climate change. Her work has determined causes of change in temperature, rainfall, and extreme events and she had key roles in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments of climate change. Gabriele is a fellow of the Royal Society.  

Pete Smith is Professor of Soils and Global Change at the Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK) and Science Director of the Scottish Climate Change Centre of Expertise (ClimateXChange).  His interests include climate change mitigation, soils, agriculture, food systems, ecosystem services and modelling. 

He has been an author on many reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and led its work of climate change mitigation in agriculture, forestry and land for its 4th and 5th Assessment Reports, and led its work interlinkages between land based mitigation options for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, a Fellow of the Institute of Soil Scientists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, a Fellow of the European Science Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London).

Professor Eric Wolff FRS is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University. After graduating as a chemist, he has studied ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland for the past 40 years, using them to understand changing climate, as well as changing levels of pollution in remote areas.

Professor Wolff is also an Honorary Fellow at the British Antarctic Survey where he worked for many years. He chaired the science committee of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), which produced 800,000 year records of climate from the Dome C (Antarctica) ice core. He recently held an ERC Advanced Grant that studies the past stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. He chairs the Royal Society's working party on climate change, helping to produce a number of public and policy-facing reports.