Climate Office for Polar Regions and Sea Level Rise | Umweltbundesamt

Background and Goals

Stopping, or at least slowing down, climate change, with its wide-ranging and very diverse regional effects for people and nature is one of the major challenges of the 21st Century. Whether humanity can adapt to the imminent changes in time will depend to a large extent on whether research and scientific findings can be communicated sufficiently broadly. Global networks of climate information centres, which provide significant scientific assessments particularly at regional level, can make an important contribution to decision making processes in policy, business and society.

As climate change can take different forms in different regions, farmers, coastal engineers, urban planners and political and business decision makers need first-hand information so that they can equip themselves to deal with climate change in their region. The Helmholtz community has therefore decided to establish a network of climate offices across Germany.

To do this, four regional climate offices collate and communicate research findings on regional climate change, identify information needs and integrate these into research programmes:

1. Northern German climate office (focuses on the research areas of storms, storm floods and waves, and energy and water cycles in Northern Germany)
2. Climate office for polar regions and sea level rises (covers climate change issues in polar regions, with particular focus on sea levels)
3. Southern German climate office (provides expertise in regional climate modelling and extreme events such as heavy precipitation and flooding)
4. Central German climate office (provides information on the impact of climate change in terms of the environment, land use and society, as well as proposing adaptation strategies)

Climate office for polar regions and sea level rises:

Climate fluctuations are a characteristic feature of the history of the earth. However, the final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 shows that climate change is advancing extremely quickly and that the warming over the past 50 years is highly likely to be predominantly caused by human activity.

The polar regions in particular are proving to be very sensitive to even minor changes in climate and therefore play an extremely important role in global climate events. An understanding of climate variability and change is necessary to formulate useful political concepts for climate protection and climate change adaptation strategies.

Since 1980, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Maritime Research (AWI) in the Helmholtz community has been studying the relationship between global climate and the specific ecosystems in the ocean and on land. The central focus of the research are the Arctic and Antarctic. The Alfred Wegener Institute provides important research contributions to our understanding of interactions between ice, atmospheric and ocean systems.

The climate office's objectives and tasks are:

•  Establishment of a comprehensive academic climate information services for the polar regions and rising sea levels;
•  Provision of academic contributions to interpreting research results and deriving strategies and initiatives to protect the climate and the environment;
•  Current summary and provision of climate-related AWI research findings;
• Publication of research findings for target groups in business, policy and the general public as monographs, articles in journals or at conferences, in both a national and an international context;
•  Networking with existing international knowledge;
•  Performing a forum function for climate research;
• Organising networking between all target groups in society;
•  Creation of regional climate scenarios;
•  Adopting a facilitator role between politics, business, science and the public;
•  Interface between academic findings and practical implementation.

By setting up this regional climate office, the Alfred Wegener Institute has the conceptual and organisational framework to put the results of its specialist climate-related research in the polar regions into an appropriate and differentiated form for national and international target groups in politics, business and society.

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