In the frame of IMPREX H2020 project we try to improve the ability to anticipate and respond to future hydrological extreme droughts in the Messara region, Crete. About 250km2 of the total valley area is cultivated and the remaining area (higher grounds) is used for livestock. The growth of agriculture in the Messara plain has a strong impact on the water resources and ecosystem services of the area by substantially increasing water demand. The primary goal of this case study is to introduce the advanced forecasting information developed in the frame of IMPREX to local users. We aim to test the efficiency of seasonal forecasting on monitoring and predicting hydrological and agricultural drought and to put the concept of forecasting into the water resources management practice. The knowledge developed by the project will support risk management and adaptation planning.
Prof Richard Betts, Project Director of HELIX FP7 is presenting the key findings in a full room at the University of Exeter.
We picked some of the major global river basins illustrating some of the uncertainty in river flows at different global warming according to higher end scenarios. We are using a set of high resolution global climate models driving a land surface model and we examine changes in river flow for a 1.5oC, 2oC and 4oC warmer world. For lot of the river basins the uncertainty spans zero. It is hard to distinguish wetter or drier consensus. This is a really important message for decision maker “you can’t just hang your hat on one particular outcome, you may also consider opposite than more likely”.
That’s why we are working to reduce the range of uncertainty on potential hydrological impacts at the global scale. Some of the findings are included in the recently published paper in a Special Issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.
The three EU-funded sister projects on high-end climate change, HELIX, IMPRESSIONS and RISES-AM have drawn upon their wide range of expertise from many disciplines across the natural and social sciences to develop new understanding of the implications and risks of exceeding 20C, adapting to the climate changes. The new book, High-End Climate Change in Europe examines impacts and adaptation in the policy context of food, freshwater, forestry, coastal protection, nature conservation, urban areas and infrastructure, human health and foreign policy. They book also considers cross-cutting impacts, challenges and opportunities for transformational change as a response to multiple, interacting risks.
Bias correction of climate variables is a standard practice in Climate Change Impact studies. Various methodologies have been developed within the framework of quantile mapping. However, it is well known that quantile mapping may significantly modify the long term statistics due to the time dependency of the temperature bias. How does this distortion occur? An indicative video example is presented here.
More about this methodology in ESD publication
It’s easy to see how important weather conditions are for tourism. Air temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind and sunshine duration – they all influence whether travellers think favourably about a holiday destination or not. And how would climate change affect the appeal of holiday destinations? At the recent COP meeting in Paris governments agreed to keep global temperature rise of this century ‘well below 2 C’. In their paper titled Implications of 2 °C global warming in European summer tourism published in the new journal Climate Services, Grillakis, Koutroulis, Seiradakis and Tsanis provide an insight of what these two degrees could mean for summer tourism in Europe from a climate comfort perspective.
The tourism sector plays an important role in many economies all over the world. Moreover, tourism is very sensitive to the weather conditions and therefore might also be strongly affected by future climate change.
Summer tourism can be differentiated during a core season from June to August and during an extended season from May to October. For the extended summer season from May to October, the projected impact on the Tourism Climate Index (TCI) improves the situation for summer tourism all over Europe. This finding is also reflected in the number of overnight stays at risk, which are projected to decrease over most parts of Europe, except for Portugal, Greece and Cyprus.
During the core summer season from June to August, projected changes in the TCI indicate that summer tourism in Central and Northern Europe seems to benefit from a warmer climate, whereas some Mediterranean regions will experience a warming beyond the comfort zone. This finding is also reflected in the number of overnight stays at risk during the core summer season, with fewer nights at risk in Central and Northern Europe and more overnight stays at risk in the south.
Visit IMPACT2C web-atlas interactive maps to view a full description of the methods and the impacts of on different sectors.
