News

Achieving climate goals: Researchers highlight need for fair country shares in CO2

As the war in the Middle East is currently reminding us once again, many countries around the world are heavily reliant on oil and gas. Lax climate policy and limited options for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere could cement this dependence for future generations. Scientists at the University of Graz highlight this danger in a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change. They find that rights to carbon dioxide removal should be distributed across countries just as fairly as emission budgets in order to halt global warming.

New groundbreaking computation method for climate extremes

How much will heat, flooding, drought and storms increase as a result of human-induced climate change? In a groundbreaking study, climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast and his team at the University of Graz have developed a new method for computing the hazards from extreme events: it can compute all relevant hazard metrics for events such as heat waves, floods and droughts in any region worldwide with unprecedented information content. Using it for Europe, the researchers found that anthropogenic climate change has caused a tenfold increase in extreme heat in recent decades. The study, published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes, also provides a basis for better quantifying the damage to people, ecosystems and infrastructure.

University of Graz study shows: public money for climate adaptation pays off

In order to plug the budget gap, the state is currently pinching pennies. However, when it comes to adapting to climate change, investing helps to save money. This is shown by a recently published study by the Wegener Centre at the University of Graz. "Our analyses show that protective measures more than pay off in the medium term," summarises lead author Eva Preinfalk.

Habilitation colloquium by Julia Danzer

On January 27, 2026, Julia Danzer successfully held her habilitation colloquium entitled "High quality atmospheric climatologies from radio occultation satellite observations". Congratulations!

Setback: Austria's greenhouse gas emissions rise in 2025

Climate protection is currently facing an uphill battle. The United Nations have recently been unable to agree on a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels, even though global warming continues to accelerate. Also Austria still does not have a national climate law with a clear target path for reducing emissions. This is evidently taking its toll: Austria’s greenhouse gas emissions rose again in 2025 for the first time in years, by around two and a half percent, according to calculations by researchers at the University of Graz. In addition to overly cautious climate action measures, this is due to somewhat colder winter months compared to 2024, which are driving up natural gas consumption.

Happy Holidays!

The Wegener Center team wishes you happy holidays and a joyful, healthy New Year 2026!

Wir gratulieren!

Erfolgreiche Abschlussprüfungen am Wegener Center

Fair distribution: Researchers determine just greenhouse gas budgets for all EU regions

Ten years ago, on 12 December 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement was signed at the UN Climate Conference. In order to limit global warming to well below two degrees, only a certain amount of CO2 may be emitted worldwide. While the focus was originally on national emission targets, more than 200 subnational regions and almost 300 cities have now adopted their own targets. But how many emissions are they fairly entitled to? Researchers at the University of Graz have now developed transparent criteria for fair distribution at the subnational level for the first time and determined corresponding greenhouse gas budgets for all European regions. The paper was published today in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

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