How do we raise awareness of climate change and the biodiversity crisis when facts alone aren't enough? Four students from the Master's programme Integrated Climate System Sciences (ICSS) are testing a new approach: they want to evoke an emotional response to environmental protection. That is why they have launched a pop-up...

In the German sector of the western Baltic, cod and herring stocks have declined dramatically – to less than 10 percent of their size in the 1990s. The causes include climate change, overfishing and environmental stresses, e.g. from agricultural fertilizers. The effects can be felt in the region’s economy, culture, and...

The Arctic has been experiencing record wildfires for years. Lukas Fiedler, a researcher at the Earth and Society Research Hub (ESRAH) at the University of Hamburg, has now been able to demonstrate: the extreme fire years 2019 to 2021 can be attributed to human-caused climate change. His study was published in the...

Actually, it’s all pretty straightforward: the European Union has set itself the goal of becoming climate-neutral by 2055, while Germany wants to do so by 2045. Accordingly, it has ratified a Climate Change Act and corresponding regulations are in place. For example, greenhouse gases are to be gradually reduced and climate...

UNESCO wants all at-risk coasts around the world to be “tsunami-ready” by 2030. Today, on the fifteenth anniversary of the tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, costing more than 18,000 lives and resulting in a meltdown at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, this goal has lost none of its urgency. To achieve it, twelve...

Volcanism in Iceland is well known above sea level. Our study shows that there is a “sweet spot” at certain water depths offshore Iceland where explosive volcanism can occur — however, the resulting volcanoes now lie hidden beneath the ocean surface.

This article was published first here.

When people think of Icelandic...