Roundtable Societal Resilience and Climate Extremes at 3rd German Future Earth Summit

Start: Feb 9, 2018
End: Aug 9, 2018
Location: Unweltforum Berlin, Germany
Host: Markus Reichstein, Dorothea Frank

The topic of extreme events and emergent risks under global environmental change is both scientifically challenging and of high societal relevance. It includes the study of measures for disaster risk reduction and for improving societal resilience. Even if globally averaged surface warming could be limited to "well below 2°C", as demanded by the Paris Agreement, the impacts of climate extremes at multiple temporal and spatial scales and in different regions will pose serious threats to human societies and ecosystems. Improving the societal resilience to enhance successful responses to extreme events will directly address SDGs 2, 3, 6, 9, 13, 14 and 15.

The aim is to identify key actors and questions to mobilize stakeholder attention and scientific interest. The following three groups of questions will serve as starting points to structure the roundtable discussion:
1) What climate extremes pose the greatest risks for social-ecological system and what metrics are most useful risk indicators across time scales?
2) Which procedures and related institutions are currently in place or envisioned in the future to cope with extreme events and existing or potential risk cascades?
3) What blind spots exist? What are missing elements in existing models for an optimized planning, and decision making for improving societal resilience under futures extreme events? Which good practice examples or success factors for improving resilience are known?