Climate Twins for Future – Equivalent Urban Climate as Starting Point towards more ClimateAdapted Cities

Climate change-related effects such as heat or drought stress for humans, animals and plants or overstrained infrastructures can be observed especially in urban areas. Since these increasingly problematic situations do not represent individual phenomena, but are embedded in a global system, a search for similar problems in other cities or regions followed by a transfer of solutions have evolved as proven approach in the urban, regional, rural, landscape planning and research discourse. Regarding the urgency of the climate crisis, the approach "Mainly something happens and quickly" could guide spatial development planning within this "learning from" approach. But a greater potential would exist by looking to urban structures, mainly open and green spaces, whose current urban climate point to the future for other cities. These climate forecasts combinded with specific spatial examples are called Climate Twins and are an explanatory path that allows comparisons between urban climates, but diverges on the components of time and place (Rey et al. 2020, Bastin et al. 2019, Rohat et al. 2018 and 2017, Nakageawa et al. 2017, Beniston 2014, Ungar et al. 2011, Peters-Anders et al. 2011, Loibl et al. 2010, Loibl and Peters-Anders 2009, Hallgatte 2009, Kopf et al. 2008, Hallegatte et al. 2007). The aim of this paper is to put this modeling and climate research based method into an open and green spatial planning context and develop it as part of a more climate-conscious and climate-adapted planning paradigm. By using descriptive and explorative analytical methods, questioning what role climate has played in urban development historically, currently, but especially in the future may help to understand the climatic and planning relevance of “non-built” urban structures. Thus, this paper intends to develop Climate Twins as a research-led planning topic and starting point towards more climate-adapted and sustainable cities

Climate Twins – An Attempt to Quantify Climatological Similarities

Part 4: Semantics and EnvironmentInternational audienceAs climate change appears, strategies and actions will be necessary to cope with its effects on environment and society in the coming decades. Current climate conditions can be observed everywhere in the world but future climate conditions can only be estimated through climate simulations which produce huge amounts of quantitative data. This data leads to statements like “temperature increase is expected to exceed 2.6°C” or similar and remain fuzzy to non-experts in climate research. The Climate Twins application is designed to communicate climate changes in an intuitive and understandable way by showing regions which have now similar climate conditions according to a given Point of Interest (POI) in the future. This paper explains how the application seeks for locations with similar climatological patterns according to the POI. To achieve this goal a method has been developed to quantify similarity between two locations’ climate data

Robust modelling of the impacts of climate change on the habitat suitability of forest tree species

In Europe, forests play a strategic multifunctional role, serving economic, social and environmental purposes. However, forests are among the most complex systems and their interaction with the ongoing climate change – and the multifaceted chain of potential cascading consequences for European biodiversity, environment, society and economy – is not yet well understood. The JRC PESETA project series proposes a consistent multi-sectoral assessment of the impacts of climate change in Europe. Within the PESETA II project, a robust methodology is introduced for modelling the habitat suitability of forest tree species (2071-2100 time horizon). Abies alba (the silver fir) is selected as a case study: a main European tree species often distributed in bioclimatically complex areas, spanning over various forest types and with multiple populations adapted to different conditions. The modular modelling architecture is based on relative distance similarity (RDS) estimates which link field observations with bioclimatic patterns, projecting their change under climate scenarios into the expected potential change of suitable habitat for tree species. Robust management of uncertainty is also examined. Both technical and interpretation core aspects are presented in an integrated overview. The semantics of the array of quantities under focus and the uneven sources of uncertainty at the continental scale are discussed (following the semantic array programming paradigm), with an effort to offer some minimal guidance on terminology, meaning and methodological limitations not only of the proposed approach, but also of the broad available literature – whose heterogeneity and partial ambiguity might potentially reverberate at the science-policy interface. ► How to cite: ◄ de Rigo, D., Caudullo, G., San-Miguel-Ayanz, J, Barredo, J.I., 2017. Robust modelling of the impacts of climate change on the habitat suitability of forest tree species. Publication Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. 58 pp. ISBN:978-92-79-66704-6 , https://doi.org/10.2760/29650