MOPGA fellowship for Katsumasa Tanaka

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LSCE and IPSL CMC are pleased to welcome Katsumasa Tanaka later this year as a MOPGA fellow. Katsumasa works in the field of climate and environmental science and policy. His broad career goal is to integrate various scientific theories and knowledge including uncertainties to provide useful input to climate and environmental policymaking. His main research tool is an Integrated Assessment model of reduced complexity. His current research activities deal with future climate projections, climate mitigation policies, Paris Agreement targets, and greenhouse gas emission metrics.

Katsumasa is currently a Senior Researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan. He held several positions at European institutes and universities after receiving his education in Japan, US, and Germany with a background in climate science, biogeochemistry, and applied mathematics. He has authored about 30 scholarly works, including two papers in Nature Climate Change as a first author. He is an editor for the journal Climatic Change. He also served as a Lead Author for the recent UNEP report “Air Pollution in Asia and the Pacific: Science-based Solutions.”

His MOPGA project is expected to start later this year and will run for three years. The project will carry out studies analyzing “overshoot scenarios”, i.e. scenarios overshooting the Paris Agreement temperature target temporarily before achieving it eventually. The project will investigate how the temperature overshoot of different durations and magnitudes can affect the earth system including sea-ice extent, ice sheet stability, large-scale ocean circulation, coral reef, and terrestrial biota. The project will also explore “learning” of uncertainties as a result of more observations and improved scientific understanding in the future to understand how future emission pathways could adapt to such learning. The studies will be conducted by means of an Integrated Assessment model of reduced-complexity, full-fledged earth system models, and relevant datasets where applicable. The project will aim to inform the political debate on the choice of future pathways and provide inputs to the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement in 2023.