Event series from September 19th to October 17th, 2026
We know, that we are in a crisis and we know why. In theory, we also know how to stop it. But there are still many questions that remain unanswered. That’s why we organised a seminar series during ETH lunch breaks to discuss these topics with invited speakers, students and academic staff. Thank you for everyone that joined in the fruitful discussions and special thank you to all the speakers that prepared such amazing talks, were open and approachable for questions. This is what I learned:
Disclaimer: This is what I understood and remembered from the sessions, without researching the original sources. It is possible, that I misunderstood or remembered wrong.
Consequences of the climate crisis
Thank you to Dr. Petra Sieber, Lisa Buchmann and Dr. Bianca Biess!
In the first session we developed a feeling of the dimension of the climate crisis. Dr. Petra Sieber explained that climate impacts vary temporally and spatially – Europe is a hotspot of warming. A wide range of climate related challenges occur at the same time like an increase of average temperatures, heat waves and flooding. That makes climate adaptation challenging. With several examples, we understood how this affects biodiversity and ecosystems, human health and well-being and business and economy all at the same time.
We focused on human displacement as one impact, as Lisa Bachmann presented her Master Thesis. We learned that low socio-economic development and a weak government structure means that people are less able to prevent damage or to recover from it and people will be displaced earlier. Whether people return to their homes after the impact depends on the land ownership structure. This emphasizes that in order to protect communities, it is important to bridge the knowledge of the climate-related risks and the communities‘ capabilities to deal with the risk.
The temporal and/ or spatial compounding of extreme events can also occur globally, as Dr. Bianca Biess explained. In her PhD, among other things, she focused on the five regions, where globally most of our food is being produced (“global bread basket”). She found, that these regions are particularly affected by co-occurring hot, wet or dry extremes. Diversifying food production spatially is therefore important to enhance our global food system resilience.
Crisis Preparedness
Thanks to Dr. Samuel Lüthi!
In the second session, we talked with Dr. Samuel Lüthi about climate risk and preparedness, focussing on the social dynamics of affected communities. He explained that climate risk is the interplay of impact, exposure and vulnerability. This means local managers have a lot of leverage to minimize the risk by adjusting exposure and vulnerability. One very illustrative example stuck with me:
Even within the Swiss city of Zurich we see that poor people are more affected by heat waves than rich people. The small roof-top apartments in the city centre are traditionally occupied by working class communities. The expensive areas on Züriberg are not only cooler, because they are higher up but often occupied by richer people, who also often have the option to flee to the mountains or go on vacation during summer. We learned, that the heat-related health impact on elderly people is higher and that during heat waves the number of femicides and cases of domestic violence increase. This shows on the small scale a fact that is also true on a global scale: climate adaptation and crisis preparedness is a social question, because the more vulnerable people are those stronger affected by climate extremes and have less means to protect themselves. In the case of Zurich, the lack of government action for heat reduction caused people who can afford it, to install air conditioning in their flats downtown. These individual solutions are more costly for the community and quite literally decrease the impact for an individual by enhancing the problem for the others around.
Climate mitigation
Thanks to Dr. Christian Bauer, Dr. Bentje Böer, Prof. Norman Garrick!
The climate mitigation session was packed with information and sufficiently technical with three very interesting speakers. Dr. Christian Bauer presented to us the master plan of the necessary net-zero transition, Dr. Bentje Böer followed up on where we are in terms of implementation, especially focussing on the financial aspect and Prof. Norman Garrick illustrated the importance of citizen’s activism in order to implement these solutions using the example of transportation and cars in cities. Thank you to all of you!
Dr. Christian Bauer from PSI introduced us to the technological master plan for climate mitigation. It is short, concise, clear and ready to be implemented:
- Complete decarbonisation of electricity provision, electrification of everything that can be electrified, increase of efficiency.
- Synthetic fuels and hydrogen are to be used only in the places where it makes sense. Green electricity is a limited resource and producing synfuels and hydrogen is an inefficient use of this resource. Therefore, it should be reserved for the sectors without other options like fertilizer production, shipping, aviation.
- The really hard-to-abate sectors are the ones where we can’t do it with technology alone, namely agriculture and non-CO2 climate impact of aviation. For this, we need behaviour changes (eating less meat, flying less). It is impressive that, in order to achieve such a massive transition, these are the only two aspects, where peoples’ lives are directly affected.
- Negative emissions are part of the calculation. They are the least well developed solution of all our technological solutions and that is why we talk about them much. However, we have to make sure not to overfocus on those because we need to do all the other things as well.
Dr. Bentje Böer followed up on how to actually implement this master plan and who pays for it. The financial sector is crucial, because even though the green economy is far cheaper long-term, we need a lot of money up front to implement all the changes. Especially, since we waited so long in transitioning, we now need to shut down power plants before their end of lifetime. That means we need to compensate the owners for their losses. For the green transition, we need finance from private companies. To leverage that funding, clear guidance from policy makers is necessary. Even though we know, that the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be, globally the fossil subsidies are still far higher than subsidies in renewable energy. A real challenge of finance is in climate adaptation, where there is hardly ever any money to make. This needs to be largely publicly financed.
Prof. Norman Garrick ended this session with an illustrative talk about the development of car and public transport infrastructure in the city of Zurich, comparing it to the US and other cities globally. He showed, which aspects are still inefficient and polluting within the city. Digging out historical development plans he showed, what could have been and what luckily was stopped by activist citizens. Not only did he illustrate the importance of local activism in infrastructure decisions but also explained how strong the car industry is in pushing through their interests. Looking at his hometown Kingston, he emphasized how the export of car-based infrastructure culture and ideas causes dependency on car-producing countries and thereby reenforcing neo-colonial structures. He showcased the necessity to export the culture of green, cheap and efficient public transport and the importance to construct the right infrastructure.