Focus Area 2: Climate and Environmental Change
Speaker: Dr. Elena Xoplaki, Vice Speaker: Dr. Irina Solovieva
Global environmental change encompasses changes in the Earth System, spanning from the large to the regional and local scales, driven by human activities as well as associated biological and physical processes.
Understanding the mechanisms and patterns of change as well as the systems’ interactions and feedback advances future risk assessments. Equally important is to increase our knowledge of the impacts of climate and environmental change on societies, ecosystems, food and energy systems (ZEU Focus Area 1), health, and human security. Our research aims at enhancing preparedness, supporting well-informed adaptation and mitigation strategies to safeguard and sustain human wellbeing through technologies that enable climate neutrality.
Within ZEU Focus Area 2, we support the impact assessment community and contribute to informed policy making. We study past, present, and future climate and environmental changes and their impacts at continental, regional, and local scales. We focus on understanding the role of natural and anthropogenic climate change, land use and management changes, biodiversity loss, as well as overexploitation and pollution.