Wyss Academy for Nature: Climate Scenarios for Sustainable Development (E. Davin)

Introduction

We are a group of researchers working at the interface between, climate, land use and biodiversity. We strive to contribute to a better understanding of the terrestrial biosphere’s role in the climate system. Our motivation is ultimately to produce knowledge that can directly inform solutions to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises synergistically. We are guided in this endeavor by three overarching questions:

  1. What are the risks to terrestrial ecosystems and people arising from future climate change?
  2. Which strategies, in particular land-based and Nature-based options, can help addressing these risks?
  3. What is the potential to upscale these strategies and what are the resulting co-benefits and tradeoffs with sustainable development objectives?

We aim to address the first two questions from a local to regional perspective, working in partnership with the regional Hubs of the Wyss Academy for Nature (Peru, Kenya, Laos and Bern). For the third question, we are concerned with the upscaling of potential solutions at regional to global scales.

Methods

In our research, we combine modelling and data-driven approaches. We use high-resolutions regional climate models as well as global Earth system models to generate future climate projections including land use scenarios. To explore the link between climate and biodiversity, we rely on land surface and species distribution models. We complement models with statistical analyses of remote sensing data and other observations to foster process-understanding and to estimate or monitor the climate change adaptation and mitigation potential of various land management strategies.

 

Group members