Climate and energy challenges for materials science

• Published in: Nature materials Vol. 15; no. 2; pp. 117 - 120
• Main Authors: Gielen, Dolf, Boshell, Francisco, Saygin, Deger
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Nature Publishing Group 01.02.2016
• Subjects: Climate change; Emissions; Energy; Greenhouse gases; Materials science
• ISSN: 1476-1122; 1476-4660
• DOI: 10.1038/nmat4545

The Paris agreement on climate change represents an important step in the design of a new global framework for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency and renewable energy are keys for the success of this ambitious agreement. The risks of irreversible, catastrophic consequences of human-induced global warming have concerned scientists in the past decades, and have called for a concerted action from policymakers to prevent them. A clear sign of the impactthat greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are having on the earths climate is that the average global temperature of the most recent years is the warmest on record. As a result, glaciers are rapidly disappearing and sea levels are rising more than 0.2cm per year. In September 2015, the average global temperature over land and ocean surfaces was 0.9 C above the twentieth-century average1. This temperature rise is in line with the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasting models, which relate these eects to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.