The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the Summary for Policymakers of its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, on 8 October 2018. CSIR chief scientist Prof Francois Engelbrecht attended the launch event in Korea, where he delivered an address on the impacts of global warming on tropical cylone intensities.

“This latest report is expected to have a critical impact on the upcoming 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” says Engelbrecht, who served as an invited lead author in the report and led the sections on tropical cyclones, ocean circulation and regional climate change impacts, including climate change hot spots, regional tipping points in the climate system and the impacts of climate change on regional economic growth, in particular.

The CSIR’s research on the development of a variable-resolution earth system model also contributed to numerous peer-reviewed papers that are referenced in the special report. These include papers by Engelbrecht on the drastic rate of warming in Southern Africa; the impacts of rising temperatures on human health in Africa by CSIR principal researcher Dr Rebecca Garland; and a paper on land-falling tropical cyclones over Southern Africa under different degrees of global warming by CSIR researcher Mavhungu Muthige.

The IPCC media release is available here: https://ipcc.ch/pdf/session48/pr_181008_P48_spm_en.pdf

The full title of the report is Global Warming of 1.5 °C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty (SR15). The report was requested by governments when they adopted the Paris Agreement in December 2015, at COP21 to the UNFCCC, and may be obtained here: www.ipcc.ch/report/sr1.5