During the 4th Climate Resilience in Diverse African Contexts webinar on 18 November 2026, Professor Debra Roberts will examines the implications of entering an era of 1.5°C overshoot and the choices that remain available.
What is overshoot?
Overshoot refers to the exceedance of 1.5°C warming. Professor Roberts will discuss the UNEP report which explores the risks and impacts associated with higher levels of warming, how these can be mitigated so that temperatures can decline, and how adaptation and development approaches must respond to changing conditions resulting from the overshoot, peak and decline pathway.
The webinar will unpack the key finding of the report for research and practice.
About the speaker
Professor Debra Roberts is an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (School of Life Sciences) in South Africa and holds the Professor Willem Schermerhorn Chair in Open Science from a Majority World Perspective at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
She headed the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit and Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department in eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa) between 1994 and 2024. Debra was elected as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Co-Chair of Working Group II for the sixth assessment cycle and is a Co-ordinating Lead Author for the IPCC’s upcoming Special Report on Climate Change and Cities in the seventh assessment cycle. She was a lead negotiator for the South African delegation in the fields of adaptation and loss and damage in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations.
Debra is Chair of the Board of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and was a core team member of UNEP’s Overshoot Spotlight Report.
Co-Creating Knowledge∞Action Networks
This is the third webinar organized by the Climate Resilience in Diverse African Contexts: Co-Creating Knowledge∞Action Networks (Climares) research project.
Climares is a consortium of 7 African, 7 Dutch universities and societal partners that works with dozens of researchers and actors in Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Morocco, Senegal and Uganda to investigate and address climate threats for at-risk populations in a range of governance and socioeconomic contexts in these countries.
- Related content
- Related links
- Climate Resilience in Diverse African Contexts: Co-Creating Knowledge∞Action networks research project
