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Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework.

ABSTRACT: Long-term global scenarios have underpinned research and assessment of global environmental change for four decades. Over the past ten years, the climate change research community has developed a scenario framework combining alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. Here we assess how well this framework is working and what challenges it faces. We synthesize insights from scenario-based literature, community discussions and recent experience in assessments, concluding that the framework has been widely adopted across research communities and is largely meeting immediate needs. However, some mixed successes and a changing policy and research landscape present key challenges, and we recommend several new directions for the development and use of this framework.

SUBMITTER: O'Neill BC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7688299 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework.

O'Neill Brian C BC Carter Timothy R TR Ebi Kristie K Harrison Paula A PA Kemp-Benedict Eric E Kok Kasper K Kriegler Elmar E Preston Benjamin L BL Riahi Keywan K Sillmann Jana J van Ruijven Bas J BJ van Vuuren Detlef D Carlisle David D Conde Cecilia C Fuglestvedt Jan J Green Carole C Hasegawa Tomoko T Leininger Julia J Monteith Seth S Pichs-Madruga Ramon R

Nature climate change 20201125 12

Long-term global scenarios have underpinned research and assessment of global environmental change for four decades. Over the past ten years, the climate change research community has developed a scenario framework combining alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. Here we assess how well this framework is working and what challenges it faces. We synthesize insights from scenario-based literature, community discussio ...[more]

PMID: 33262808

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Project description:Assessing the impacts of climate change in multiple fields, such as energy, land and water resources, and human health and welfare is important to find effective strategies to adapt to a changing climate and to reduce greenhouse gases. Many phenomena influenced by climate change have diurnal fluctuations and are affected by simultaneous interactions among multiple meteorological factors. However, climate scenarios with detailed (at least hourly) resolutions are usually not available. To assess the impact of climate change on such phenomena while considering simultaneous interactions (e.g., synergies), climate scenarios with hourly fluctuations are indispensable. However, because meteorological indicators are not independent, the value of one indicator varies as a function of other indicators. Therefore, it is almost impossible to determine the functions that show all relationships among meteorological elements considering the geographical and temporal (both seasonal and time of a day) characteristics. Therefore, generating hourly scenarios that include possible combinations of meteorological indicators for each hourly observation unit is a challenging problem. In this study, we provide secondary future climate scenario datasets that have hourly fluctuations with reasonable combinations of meteorological indicator values that are likely to occur simultaneously, without losing the long-term climate change trend in the existing daily climate scenarios based on global climate models. Historical hourly weather datasets observed from 2017 to 2019 (the reference years) are used to retrieve short-term fluctuations. Bias-corrected daily future climate scenario datasets generated using four global climate models (GFDL CM3, HadGEM2-ES, MIROC5, and MRI-CGCM3) and two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP8.5 and 2.6) are used to model long-term climate change. A total of 48 different types of hourly future scenario datasets for five meteorological indicators (temperature, solar radiation, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed) were acquired, targeting a projection period from 2020 to 2080, for 10 weather stations in Japan. The generated hourly climate scenario datasets can be used to project the quantitative impacts of climate change on targeted phenomena considering simultaneous interactions among multiple meteorological factors.

Project description:Current observed as well as projected changes in biodiversity are the result of multiple interacting factors, with land use and climate change often marked as most important drivers. We aimed to disentangle the separate impacts of these two for sets of vascular plant, bird, butterfly and dragonfly species listed as characteristic for European dry grasslands and wetlands, two habitats of high and threatened biodiversity. We combined articulations of the four frequently used SRES climate scenarios and associated land use change projections for 2030, and assessed their impact on population trends in species (i.e. whether they would probably be declining, stable or increasing). We used the BIOSCORE database tool, which allows assessment of the effects of a range of environmental pressures including climate change as well as land use change. We updated the species lists included in this tool for our two habitat types. We projected species change for two spatial scales: the EU27 covering most of Europe, and the more restricted biogeographic region of 'Continental Europe'. Other environmental pressures modelled for the four scenarios than land use and climate change generally did not explain a significant part of the variance in species richness change. Changes in characteristic bird and dragonfly species were least pronounced. Land use change was the most important driver for vascular plants in both habitats and spatial scales, leading to a decline in 50-100% of the species included, whereas climate change was more important for wetland dragonflies and birds (40-50 %). Patterns of species decline were similar in continental Europe and the EU27 for wetlands but differed for dry grasslands, where a substantially lower proportion of butterflies and birds declined in continental Europe, and 50 % of bird species increased, probably linked to a projected increase in semi-natural vegetation. In line with the literature using climate envelope models, we found little divergence among the four scenarios. Our findings suggest targeted policies depending on habitat and species group. These are, for dry grasslands, to reduce land use change or its effects and to enhance connectivity, and for wetlands to mitigate climate change effects.

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Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework.

Publications

Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework.

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