The ambition of the 2015 Paris Agreement of the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has caught the world by surprise. "Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C" represents a substantially more ambitious mitigation objective than many were expecting, and reveals a significant research gap on the nature, benefits and feasibility of a 1.5 degree world, as well as a huge policy challenge.
The 1.5 degrees conference will bring together researchers, policy makers, businesses and members of civil society to understand the impacts of warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and assess the feasibility of meeting the challenges in the Paris Climate Agreement. The conference will review the arguments behind the 1.5 degrees goal and will seek to understand how the goal is to be interpreted. It will explore the options for how a 1.5 degrees target could be achieved and evaluate the possible consequences of the goal from a wide range of perspectives.
The 1.5 degrees conference will contribute to the evidence base for the Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, which the IPCC has been called upon to produce in 2018.
