TITLE: Scenario development for climate change impact

The full work-package description can be found here.

Problem definition, aim and central research questions

Impact of climate change in the Rhine Meuse delta will be not so much through changes in climate parameters, rainfall, temperature, etc. directly, but more through effects of the changed climate on hydrology, sea level, nature and atmosphere. Adaptation to climate change in the Netherlands means therefore above all adaptation to the effects of these changes on the environmental conditions. The process of designing adaptation strategies requires a supply of climate, hydrological, ecological and socio-economical scenarios. Many scenario studies have been carried out to assess the effect of climate change on natural resources. A problem, however, is that despite the great number of studies, a consistent view on the indirect (i.e. hydrological, hydrodynamical, ecological) effects is lacking. This is caused by the limited scope of the effect studies, mostly they focus on a single natural boundary condition, or are limited to assessments for small areas. The inherent interdisciplinary character of climate change and the need to develop adaptation strategies at local to regional scales requires that climate and climate impact data and models are coupled to determine regional implications of global climate change. For developing spatial planning strategies, this requires coupling between climate scenarios and sectoral climate impact models (water, nature, agriculture and socio-economic models).

A second issue is that we notice that so far scenario building mainly concentrated on generating scenarios where the emphasis was on their sound scientific basis (physically meaningful, consistent, scientifically sound statistics, etc.). Less attention has been paid to explore the effectiveness of the scenarios for decision making. In operational weather and flow forecasting this is often referred to as the difference between the quality of the forecast, and the value of the forecast (e.g. Zhu et al. 2002). Where (natural) scientists emphasize mainly on the quality, the decision makers are more interested in the value. I.e. their general question is " Would I take another decision" based on the information provided.
These considerations lead to aims of this :

  • To provide quantitative projections including uncertainties for changes in water, agriculture, nature and air quality by means of coupled climate and natural resources models including air pollution.
  • To provide scenarios that not only have a sound scientific basis, but that are also valuable for decision making.
  • And in this way arrive to best practice to present projections for changes in natural boundary conditions including their uncertainty.

Thus the central research question that will be adressed in this workpackage is:
How to couple climate projections to impact assessment models and how can uncertainty in the impact assessment be incorporated in such a way that it can effectively been used by the adaptation climate community?

Interdisciplinarity and coherence between the projects

In this workpackage we bring scientists from different environmental sciences (climatology, meteorology, hydrology, agronomy, ecology) together and link them through land use change projections with social and economical scientists.
In broad outlines the role of the different projects is as follows:

  • Project 3.1 focuses on the preparation of scenarios for natural resources in different formats. The basis for this is the currently available climate and water projections. These will be produced in the first stage of the project. In a later phase the results are updated using the most recent results from the WP 1 and 2 as well as from the projects WP3.2 to WP 3.6
  • Projects 3.2- 3.5 focuses on the coupling of different environmental (water, agriculture, nature) and climate models and the supply of quantitative information required to develop scenarios.
  • WP 3.6 focuses to the evaluation of scenarios in different formats with the climate adaptation community. This work package should result into recommendations on the most suitable format of the scenarios for further use.
    Figure 1 shows the relation between the different projects within this WP3.

As such we will achieve (a) an updated set of climate change and environmental effects scenarios including a more thorough assessment of the associated uncertainties and; (b) include the findings obtained in WP 3.6 on the effectivity of scenarios for adaptation purposes.

Stakeholders

Apart from providing scenarios for the effects of climate change on water, agriculture, nature and air quality, this project specifically focusses to explore effective ways to provide scenarios for climate change and its effects on natural resources to the community that is responsible to design adaptation measures. We consider the representatives from the KvK Hot Spot projects as well as from the KvK Theme 1 and 2 our main stakeholders

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