High-end climate change risks for Germany

What would high-end climate change mean for Germany by the end of the century? Our results show that if the country’s  adaptive capacity erodes, major disasters related to urban heat, droughts, and sea-level rise can be expected even before 2050. However, even under optimistic assumptions regarding adaptive capacity, high-end climate change may hit the country hard  by the end of the century.

Given the combination of still increasing greenhouse gas emissions and growing challenges to climate policies worldwide, it is necessary to adopt a reasonable worst-case risk management perspective to adaptation. We consider the risks of high-end climate change to Germany by varying its societal and political adaptive capacity (AC) and we develop different adaptation pathways in selected sectors through the year 2100 under the assumption of both high and low ACs. Results show that under a high-end climate change scenario, Germany might experience severe sector-specific breakdowns even before 2050 in the unfavorable, but also soon after 2050 in the favorable case. While there is no alternative to deep and rapid de-carbonization, Germany’s AC needs to be strength-ened substantially in order to implement the needed transformative adaptation measures and to avoid early disasters and unmanaged retreats.