The Climate Change Crisis: Where on Earth are We Going?

Will Steffen

Emeritus Professor, The Australian National University

Councillor, Climate Council of Australia

The climate change narrative is changing rapidly. As evidence mounts that the impacts and risks of climate change are with us now and are accelerating, the words “crisis” and “emergency” are increasingly connected with climate change. This talk will present the latest science on climate change – observations of worsening extreme weather events, the challenge of meeting the Paris temperature targets, and the rapidly disappearing carbon budget. We’ll also note the links between climate change and Earth’s rapidly degrading biosphere, as well as the longer-term Earth System perspective on the crisis. Finally, the talk will explore potential solutions to the climate change challenge, and the nature and magnitude of the societal changes that are required.

Will Steffen is an Earth System scientist. He is a Councillor on the publicly-funded Climate Council of Australia that delivers independent expert information about climate change, an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University (ANU); Canberra, a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden; and a Fellow at the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Stockholm. He is the chair of the jury for the Volvo Environment Prize; a member of the International Advisory Board for the Centre for Collective Action Research, Gothenburg University, Sweden; and a member of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Sub-committee on Quaternary Stratigraphy.

From 1998 to mid-2004, Steffen was Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, based in Stockholm. His research interests span a broad range within climate and Earth System science, with an emphasis on incorporation of human processes in Earth System modelling and analysis; and on sustainability and climate change.