How can the European Union adapt to climate change? Bruegel Policy Contribution Issue n˚11/22 | June 2022.

Europe must increasingly deal with the harmful impacts of climate change, regardless of its success in reducing emissions. These impacts have significant cross-border effects and threaten to deepen existing divisions. Cooperation on adaptation, which is mostly seen as requiring local or regional efforts, may be useful, but the role of the European Union is ill-defined. We give an overview of how climate change might change Europe and how it might affect people and the economy. We also discuss what sort of adaptation policies are being pursued at EU level and on what grounds. We argue that a stronger adaptation governance framework would benefit adaptation efforts. We formulate three ideas to strengthen adaptation. First is a three-layered governance framework based on intensive cooperation to establish binding adaptation plans. Second is an EU-level insurance scheme against damages from climate change, with the size of national contributions tied to the achievement of self-chosen targets in adaptation plans. Our final suggestion is to increase ex-ante adaptation funding by targeting more spending under EU regional and agricultural policies specifically to adaptation in the most vulnerable regions

A new regional climate model for POLAR-CORDEX : evaluation of a 30-year hindcast with COSMO-CLM2 over Antarctica

Continent-wide climate information over the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is important to obtain accurate information of present climate and reduce uncertainties of the ice sheet mass balance response and resulting global sea level rise to future climate change. In this study, the COSMO-CLM2 Regional Climate Model is applied over the AIS and adapted for the specific meteorological and climatological conditions of the region. A 30-year hindcast was performed and evaluated against observational records consisting of long-term ground-based meteorological observations, automatic weather stations, radiosoundings, satellite records, stake measurements and ice cores. Reasonable agreement regarding the surface and upper-air climate is achieved by the COSMO-CLM2 model, comparable to the performance of other state-of-the-art climate models over the AIS. Meteorological variability of the surface climate is adequately simulated, and biases in the radiation and surface mass balance are small. The presented model therefore contributes as a new member to the COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment project over the AIS (POLAR-CORDEX) and the CORDEX-CORE initiative

Binary properties of CH and Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor stars

The HERMES spectrograph installed on the 1.2-m Mercator telescope has been used to monitor the radial velocity of 13 low-metallicity carbon stars, among which 7 Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor (CEMP) stars and 6 CH stars. All stars but one show clear evidence for binarity. New orbits are obtained for 8 systems. The sample covers an extended range in orbital periods, extending from 3.4 d (for the dwarf carbon star HE 0024-2523) to about 54 yr (for the CH star HD 26, the longest known among barium, CH and extrinsic S stars). Three systems exhibit low-amplitude velocity variations with periods close to 1 yr superimposed on a long-term trend. In the absence of an accurate photometric monitoring of these systems, it is not clear yet whether these variations are the signature of a very low-mass companion, or of regular envelope pulsations. The period - eccentricity (P - e) diagram for the 40 low-metallicity carbon stars with orbits now available shows no difference between CH and CEMP-s stars (the latter corresponding to those CEMP stars enriched in s-process elements, as are CH stars). We suggest that they must be considered as one and the same family and that their different names only stem from historical reasons. Indeed, these two families have as well very similar mass-function distributions, corresponding to companions with masses in the range 0.5 - 0.7 Msun, indicative of white-dwarf companions, adopting 0.8 - 0.9 Msun for the primary component. This result confirms that CH and CEMP-s stars obey the same mass-transfer scenario as their higher-metallicity analogs, the barium stars. The P - e diagrams of barium, CH and CEMP-s stars are indeed very similar. They reveal two different groups of systems: one with short orbital periods (P < 1000 d) and mostly circular or almost circular orbits, and another with longer-period and eccentric (e > 0.1) orbits.Comment: Accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysic

De Noordzee: een waardevol archief onder water. Meer dan 100 jaar onderzoek van strandvondsten en vondsten uit zee in België: een overzicht

De Noordzee kan beschouwd worden als een waardevol en speciaal archief, met heel wat interessante informatie over het verleden. De zone beneden de laagwaterlijn behoort tot het domein van de subtidale archeologie of de archeologie van het subgetijdengebied van de Noordzee. De zone tussen de hoog- en de laagwaterlijn behoort tot de intertidale archeologie of de archeologie van het intergetijdengebied van de Noordzee. In het eerste deel van deze studie wordt kort de geschiedenis van het onderzoek in deze beide zones geschetst. Daarna wordt in een tweede deel een chronologisch overzicht gegeven van de resultaten van het onderzoek en dit vanaf het ontstaan van de archeologie als wetenschappelijke discipline. In dit tweede deel wordt ook een klein aantal tot nu toe ongepubliceerde vondsten opgenomen van buiten het Belgische deel van de Noordzee. De reden hiervoor is zowel pragmatisch als inhoudelijk. Enerzijds worden deze vondsten geregistreerd samen met de andere vondsten, ze bevinden zich immers samen in de bestudeerde collecties. Anderzijds dragen ze ook inhoudelijk bij tot een beter inzicht in de genese van het hele zuidelijke Noordzeegebied, waarvan de zone onder Belgisch toezicht deel uitmaakt. Verder dienen in dit tweede deel ook een aantal vraagstellingen en onderzoeksstrategieën als basis voor de globale discussie in het derde deel van deze bijdrage. De bijdrage wordt ten slotte afgesloten met een zo volledig mogelijke bibliografie over het onderzoek in het Belgische deel van de Noordzee inclusief de stranden

From vocational training to education: the development of a no-frontiers education policy for Europe?

This article focuses on developments towards an EU educational policy. Education was not included as one of the Community competencies in the Treaty of Rome. The first half of the article analyses the way that the European Court of Justice and the Commission of the European Communities between them managed to develop a series of substantial Community programmes out of Article 128 on vocational training. The second half of the article discusses educational developments in the community following the Treaty on European Union and the Treaty of Amsterdam. Whilst the legal competence of the community now includes education, the author's argument is that the inclusion of an educational competence will not result in further developments to mirror those in the years before the Treaty on Europe</p

Ice core evidence for a 20th century increase in surface mass balance in coastal Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica

Ice cores provide temporal records of surface mass balance (SMB). Coastal areas of Antarctica have relatively high and variable SMB, but are under-represented in records spanning more than 100 years. Here we present SMB reconstruction from a 120 m-long ice core drilled in 2012 on the Derwael Ice Rise, coastal Dronning Maud Land, East Antarctica. Water stable isotope (δ18O and δD) stratigraphy is supplemented by discontinuous major ion profiles and continuous electrical conductivity measurements. The base of the ice core is dated to AD 1759 ± 16, providing a climate proxy for the past  ∼ 250 years. The core's annual layer thickness history is combined with its gravimetric density profile to reconstruct the site's SMB history, corrected for the influence of ice deformation. The mean SMB for the core's entire history is 0.47 ± 0.02 m water equivalent (w.e.) a−1. The time series of reconstructed annual SMB shows high variability, but a general increase beginning in the 20th century. This increase is particularly marked during the last 50 years (1962–2011), which yields mean SMB of 0.61 ± 0.01 m w.e. a−1. This trend is compared with other reported SMB data in Antarctica, generally showing a high spatial variability. Output of the fully coupled Community Earth System Model (CESM) suggests that, although atmospheric circulation is the main factor influencing SMB, variability in sea surface temperatures and sea ice cover in the precipitation source region also explain part of the variability in SMB. Local snow redistribution can also influence interannual variability but is unlikely to influence long-term trends significantly. This is the first record from a coastal ice core in East Antarctica to show an increase in SMB beginning in the early 20th century and particularly marked during the last 50 years

A wind-driven snow redistribution module for Alpine3D v3.3.0: adaptations designed for downscaling ice sheet surface mass balance

Ice sheet surface mass balance describes the net snow accumulation at the ice sheet surface. On the Antarctic ice sheet, winds redistribute snow, resulting in a surface mass balance that is variable in both space and time. Representing wind-driven snow redistribution processes in models is critical for local assessments of surface mass balance, repeat altimetry studies, and interpretation of ice core accumulation records. To this end, we have adapted Alpine3D, an existing distributed snow modeling framework, to downscale Antarctic surface mass balance to horizontal resolutions up to 1 km. In particular, we have introduced a new two-dimensional advection-based wind-driven snow redistribution module that is driven by an offline coupling between WindNinja, a wind downscaling model, and Alpine3D. We then show that large accumulation variability can be at least partially explained by terrain-induced wind speed variations which subsequently redistribute snow around rolling topography. By comparing Alpine3D to airborne-derived snow accumulation measurements within a testing domain over Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, we demonstrate that our Alpine3D downscaling approach improves surface mass balance estimates when compared to the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2), a global atmospheric reanalysis which we use as atmospheric forcing. In particular, when compared to MERRA-2, Alpine3D reduces simulated surface mass balance root mean squared error by 23.4 mmw.e.yr-1 (13 %) and increases variance explained by 24 %. Despite these improvements, our results demonstrate that considerable uncertainty stems from the employed saltation model, confounding simulations of surface mass balance variability.</p

The comitology game: European policymaking with parliamentary involvement

This paper discusses institutional reforms that might strengthen the role of the European Parliament in the policymaking process of the European Union. Using simple game theory, the paper analyzes the working properties of the different implementation procedures that are known as ‘comitology’. The Council of the European Union employs these procedures when it delegates some of its policymaking power to the Commission as part of Union legislation. We show how the balance of power is determined by the current comitology procedures, and how this balance would change if the role of the European Parliament were strengthened in the comitology game

Meltwater produced by wind–albedo interaction stored in an East Antarctic ice shelf

Surface melt and subsequent firn air depletion can ultimately lead to disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves1,2 causing grounded glaciers to accelerate3 and sea level to rise. In the Antarctic Peninsula, foehn winds enhance melting near the grounding line4, which in the recent past has led to the disintegration of the most northerly ice shelves5,6. Here, we provide observational and model evidence that this process also occurs over an East Antarctic ice shelf, where meltwaterinduced firn air depletion is found in the grounding zone. Unlike the Antarctic Peninsula, where foehn events originate from episodic interaction of the circumpolar westerlies with the topography, in coastal East Antarctica high temperatures are caused by persistent katabatic winds originating from the ice sheet’s interior. Katabatic winds warm and mix the air as it flows downward and cause widespread snow erosion, explaining >3 K higher near-surface temperatures in summer and surface melt doubling in the grounding zone compared with its surroundings. Additionally, these winds expose blue ice and firn with lower surface albedo, further enhancing melt. The in situ observation of supraglacial flow and englacial storage of meltwater suggests that ice-shelf grounding zones in East Antarctica, like their Antarctic Peninsula counterparts, are vulnerable to hydrofracturing7