Interview: Debra Roberts Explains Climate Overshoot

What happens when we pass 1.5°C of global warming — and then try to come back?

In this episode of the Geoversity Video Podcast, host Jelle Ferwerda (Research Coordinator at ITC) sits down with Professor Debra Roberts, Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban, South Africa) to unpack one of the most urgent - and uncomfortable - topics in climate science today: climate overshoot.

From the origins of the Paris Agreement to the real-world risks of exceeding 1.5°C, Debra explains why overshoot isn’t just a technical detail but a turning point that reshapes how we think about risk, justice, adaptation, and our future development paths.

Some of the topics covered are:

• Why the 1.5°C target matters — and why we’re likely to exceed it
• The difference between weather and long-term climate change
• Why some regions are heating much faster than others
• The limits of adaptation (even in countries that are well-prepared)

Prefer to listen to audio? You can also hear this interview as a podcast by following this link. 

This conversation connects global climate science to local realities, showing why climate change — and climate overshoot — will affect everyone, everywhere, just not equally.

And if you haven't seen it yet, check out the first part of our interview with Professor Roberts, where we discussed the topic of Open Science, and its implications for collaboration between researchers from the African continent and the EU.