Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change

The Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change is an interdisciplinary, internationally oriented research center of the University of Graz (Faculty of Environmental and Regional Sciences and Education, with base institutes also in the Faculties of Natural Sciences and Social and Economic Sciences), which combines the competences of the University in the research areas "Climate, Environmental, and Global Change". The center brings together, in a building close to the University central campus dedicated for that purpose, research teams and scientists from fields such as geophysics and climate physics, meteorology, economics, geography, and regional sciences. At the same time, close links exist and are further developed with many cooperation partners, both nationally and internationally. The research interests extend from monitoring, analysis, modelling and prediction of climate and environmental change via climate impact research to the analysis of the human dimensions of these changes, i.e., the role of humans in causing and being affected by climate and environmental change as well as concerning adaptation and mitigation. The director of the center, hosting about 35 researchers, is the geophysicist Gottfried Kirchengast, the lead partner and deputy director is the economist Karl Steininger.