Climate crisis: Even temporarily overshooting 2°C would cause permanent damage to Earth’s species

Jul 8, 2022

The concept of climate overshoot is the next thing we will need to get to grips with. Image: UNSPLASH/Jeremy Bezanger

Joanne Bentley

Postdoctoral Researcher in Molecular Ecology, African Climate & Development Initiative., University of Cape Town

Alex Pigot

Research Fellow, Genetics, Evolution & Environment Division of Biosciences., UCL

Andreas L. S. Meyer

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Cape Town

Christopher Trisos

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Maryland

Our Impact

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Climate Change is affecting economies, industries and global issues

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Climate Change

In this scenario in which the world climate overshoots the 2°C target, emissions do not peak until 2040. Image: Meyer et al.

Tropical corals exist at the limit of their thermal tolerance and are especially vulnerable to climate change. Image: Unsplash/ Qui Nguyen

Discover

What’s the World Economic Forum doing about climate change?

Have you read?

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

The Agenda Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

Subscribe today

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.