Climate change is no doubt one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today.

This phenomenon introduces lasting changes to our environment and exhausts the availability of certain natural resources. It could jeopardize our very way of life and have major impacts on the social and political fabric of communities around the world.

Understanding the underlying factors and forecasting the consequences for our environment and the world’s populations are thus fundamental priorities. Such understanding enables the scientific community, decision-makers, businesses and each of us as individuals to adapt our behaviours to mitigate our impact on the climate.
Reflecting the Group’s ongoing commitment to fighting climate change, the BNP Paribas Foundation has launched a new initiative in collaboration with the Group Corporate Social Responsibility function.

Four selected projects:

In order to select projects for support, the CSR Delegation and the Foundation set up a scientific committee. Chaired by Philippe Gillet, Vice-President of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale at Lausanne in Switzerland, the committee brought together such eminent researchers as Joanna Haigh (Imperial College, London), Jean-Pascal Van Ypersele (Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics at the Catholic University of Louvain),Thomas Stocker (Institute of Physics at the University of Berne) and Riccardo Valentini (University of Tuscia, Viterbo).

Chosen from among the fifty applications for funding, four research programmes will receive support over the next three years:

AAA: Digital processing and archiving of historic climate data so as to make it accessible to scientific experts worldwide

eFOCE: Implementation of experimental systems to aid understanding and prediction of the impact of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems

PRECLIDE: Development and application of methods of estimating climate change over the next thirty years

Global Carbon Atlas: Creation of an online tool to provide comprehensive information on the flow of greenhouse gases on a global scale

BNP Paribas and its Foundation, Météo France, Archives Nationales, Global Carbon Project, CERFACS/CNRS, LGGE/CNRS, Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche/CNRS-UPMC support these projects.