National climate projections
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National climate (change) projections are specialised regional climate projections, typically produced for individual countries by their national meteorological services or institutions working on climate change. The climate projections (narratives, graphs, maps, and often including raw data) are often publicly available for climate impact studies, risk assessments, climate change adaptation research, policy makers, public and private decision makers, including government agencies. Often several scenarios (e.g. RCPs are presented, allowing users more choice in exploring impacts. The results are updated every few years, when further scientific insights and improved climate models are available.
Aims
National climate (change) projections inform how a country's climate may change in the future under some predefined scenarios. The projections often explore the uncertainty range, to give better guidance to users. National climate projections form the basis of national climate adaptation and climate resilience plans, which are also collected by the UNFCCC.
Design
To explore a wide range of possible outcomes and to enhance confidence in the projections, national climate change projections are often generated from general circulation model climate ensembles, which can take the form of perturbed physics ensembles (PPE), multi-model ensembles (MME) or initial condition ensembles. As the resolution of the underlying GCMs are typically quite coarse, the projections are often downscaled using regional climate models (RCMs), this is called dynamical downscaling; an alternative approach uses statistical methods. Some projections include data from areas which are larger than the national boundaries, e.g. to more fully evaluate catchment areas of trans-boundary rivers.
Examples
- Australia: CCIA [1]
- California: Cal-Adapt [2]
- Netherlands: KNMI'14 [3]
- Switzerland: CH2011 / CH2018 [4]
- UK: UKCP09 / UKCP18 [5]
For countries which lack adequate resources to develop their own climate change projections, organisations such as UNDP or FAO have sponsored development of projections and national adaptation programmes (NAPAs) [6] [7].
Applications
National climate projections are widely used to predict climate change impacts in a wide range of economic sectors, and also to inform climate change adaptation studies and decisions. Some examples include:
- Energy [8]
- Water [9]
- Agriculture & Forestry [10]
- Fisheries [11]
- Ecosystems & Biodiversity [12]
- Health [13]
- Transport [14]
- Coastal Areas [15]
- Tourism [16]
- Insurance [17]
- Infrastructure [18]
- Cities & Urban Environment [19]
- Disaster Risk [20]
Comparisons
A detailed comparison between some national climate projections have been carried out [21] and [22].
See also
External links
- National climate change vulnerability and risk assessments in Europe, 2018
- Climate-ADAPT portal (large selection of European studies using national climate projections)
References
- ^ Climate Change in Australia
- ^ California climate change scenarios and climate impact research
- ^ KNMI'14 Pictures of the future - Climate scenarios
- ^ CH2018 - New Climate Scenarios for Switzerland
- ^ UKCP18 Project announcement
- ^ UNDP - Supporting Integrated Climate Change Strategies
- ^ UNFCCC - National Adaptation Programmes of Action - Introduction
- ^ European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM)
- ^ California's Climate Adaptation Strategy for Water
- ^ Climate-ADAPT EU sector policies - Agriculture
- ^ []
- ^ []
- ^ Health effects of climate change in the UK 2012
- ^ []
- ^ The Netherland's Delta Programme 2018 - Continuing the work on a sustainable and safe delta
- ^ []
- ^ []
- ^ []
- ^ Australia's National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy
- ^ []
- ^ The social and scientific values that shape national climate scenarios: a comparison of the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK
- ^ National climate change vulnerability and risk assessments in Europe, 2018