Climate Awareness Month

This month we are looking at Climate Change due to the recent media attention about the impacts of Covid-19 on the environment. On this page we've provided information about essential readings, links to relevant webpages about European Sustainable Development and an overview of the changes we've seen during the pandemic. If you have any questions , fill in our question's form for this month here.

Reading Recommendations from the Book Display Team

We have provied a list of some interesting eResoucres available online so you can find out more about the environment from the comfort of your own home.

Climate Jargon Buster

We have the benefit of having an MSc Climate Change student in our team, so they have provided a list of terms that are often used in climate change papers and academic writing to help you make sense of the reading list we have provided below. If you come accross anything you don't understand or you want something climate related explained, just fill in our question form here.

Pollution

This term is used very broadly in climate science. There are five main pollutants we look at :

• Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

• Nitrous Dioxide (NO2)

• Methane (CH4)

• Sulphur Dioxide (SO2)

• Particulate Matter (PM_2.5 & PM₁₀)- e.g. soot particles, pollen, and micro-plastics. The numbers refer to how big the item is in micrometres (µm)

Sea Level Rise (SLR)

It's just an abbreviation, but in long articles they love to shorten it to save words and it's used in graphs too.

Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP)

These are different Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations that the United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has developed. There are 4 of them (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, RCP8.5) and the numbers are based upon different radiative forcing’s in 2100, so at this point they’re a bit arbitrary. There are 3 new ones now too, they’re a little different and work with something called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs).

There’s also a lot of UN abbreviations you’re likely to come across in our recommended readings, such as :

UNFCCC – United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

COP : Conference of the Parties (of the UNFCCC) – this is the big conference every year they hold around November. Paris 2015 was a big one, and we’re supposed to be hosting COP26 this year.

IPCC – I’ve mentioned this one above, but basically this is the big UN group that publishes a report every 5 years and this is basically the best understanding of scientists today. If you want to read any of this stick to the Policymakers report – there is no point in reading the long form, I barely touch them until I need something specific because they’re very long.

Useful links

European Comission - Climate Change Service : https://climate.copernicus.eu/

Climate Change: A Horizon Guide : https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/08CE0D0A?bcast=115189199