The environmental impact of climate change adaptation on land use and water quality

Encouraging adaptation is an essential aspect of the policy response to climate change1. Adaptation seeks to reduce the harmful consequences and harness any beneficial opportunities arising from the changing climate. However, given that human activities are the main cause of environmental transformations worldwide2, it follows that adaptation itself also has the potential to generate further pressures, creating new threats for both local and global ecosystems. From this perspective, policies designed to encourage adaptation may conflict with regulation aimed at preserving or enhancing environmental quality. This aspect of adaptation has received relatively little consideration in either policy design or academic debate. To highlight this issue, we analyse the trade-offs between two fundamental ecosystem services that will be impacted by climate change: provisioning services derived from agriculture and regulating services in the form of freshwater quality. Results indicate that climate adaptation in the farming sector will generate fundamental changes in river water quality. In some areas, policies that encourage adaptation are expected to be in conflict with existing regulations aimed at improving freshwater ecosystems. These findings illustrate the importance of anticipating the wider impacts of human adaptation to climate change when designing environmental policies

Climate change Assessing the impacts - identifying responses; the first three years of the UK Climate Impacts Programme

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m00/31588 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

RegIS Regional climate change impact and response studies in East Anglia and North West England

The RegIS project (CC0337) is part of the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Full final summary report and full report are avail. via the InternetAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m02/18303 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Useful global-change scenarios: current issues and challenges

"Scenarios are increasingly used to inform global-change debates, but their connection to decisions has been weak and indirect. This reflects the greater number and variety of potential users and scenario needs, relative to other decision domains where scenario use is more established. Global-change scenario needs include common elements, e.g., model-generated projections of emissions and climate change, needed by many users but in different ways and with different assumptions. For these common elements, the limited ability to engage diverse global-change users in scenario development requires extreme transparency in communicating underlying reasoning and assumptions, including probability judgments. Other scenario needs are specific to users, requiring a decentralized network of scenario and assessment organizations to disseminate and interpret common elements and add elements requiring local context or expertise. Such an approach will make global-change scenarios more useful for decisions, but not less controversial. Despite predictable attacks, scenario-based reasoning is necessary for responsible global-change decisions because decision-relevant uncertainties cannot be specified scientifically. The purpose of scenarios is not to avoid speculation, but to make the required speculation more disciplined, more anchored in relevant scientific knowledge when available, and more transparent."http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64189/1/erl8_4_045016.pd

Preliminary evaluation of the benefits of a participatory regional integrated assessment software.

This paper provides a preliminary evaluation of the Regional Impact Simulator—a user-friendly, PC-based tool designed with stakeholders for stakeholders wishing to assess the effects of climate and/or socio-economic change on the important sectors and resources in the UK at a regional scale, in particular, impacts to coastal and river flooding, agriculture, water resources and biodiversity. While integrated assessments are relatively new, simulators that help stakeholders visualize and think about potential changes in the environment or society at a regional scale are very new. An earlier project, RegIS1, was the first local/ regional integrated assessment conducted in the UK. It developed a method for engaging stakeholders in a “stakeholder-led” integrated assessment process. The RegIS2 project developed a simulation tool and followed the same “stakeholder- led” principle in designing and testing the tool. The role of stakeholders in informing the design of the simulator is discussed here, as is a stakeholder evaluation survey on its success in meeting its objectives. We also reflect on the need and desire of stakeholders to have such a tool. And because the Steering Committee – made up of stakeholders – was so invaluable in ensuring the usefulness of research outputs, a series of Steering Committee ‘rules’ is proposed intending to maximise the benefits of this valuable resource. Finally, we outline how our experience with the ‘Regional Impact Simulator’ serves as a test-bed for further studies of stakeholder-led, regional

Utilising scenarios to facilitate multi-objective land use modelling for broadland, UK, to 2100

Landscapes that we see today will change in the future. Scenarios are used as a method for dealing with uncertainties in change and to provide plausible descriptions of our future world. A number of projects have utilised scenarios and a modelling-based approach to quantitatively investigate land use change at the national/regional-scale using a GIS. However, the coarse-scale of such land use data can render outputs inapplicable within local, often environmentally sensitive, landscapes. Improving data resolution allows us to investigate alternative potential futures at greater detail thereby providing vital input into policy and future decision-making. It may also facilitate localised studies of habitat fragmentation connectivity and visualisation. This paper utilises scenarios and regional-scale land use change data to facilitate a GIS-based model of land use change within a sensitive wetland environment. Land use change data from the RegIS project is localised to the study area in Broadland, UK. Areal totals, from the land use change data, are replicated within 0.01% of areal totals prescribed, enabling very spatially detailed land use maps to be developed. This work represents a locally explicit realisation of coarser regional-scale land use change data using an integrated GIS-Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (GIS-MCDA) methodology

Believing is seeing: Laypeople's views of future socio-economic and climate change in England and in Italy

Cross-cultural studies are particularly relevant in the context of climate change, given its pervasive character and the growing demand for climate change mitigation at both global and local levels. This paper reports on findings from comparative cross-cultural mixed-methods research eliciting perceptions of the future among citizens in Norwich (UK) and Rome (Italy). The paper explores how individuals at the two locations interpret socio-economic and climate scenarios, and how they relate environmental change to human behavior. Attitude segmentation was found to be similar in both localities. Although most participants in both locations realized the benefits of a future centered on sustainable resource use and societal welfare, individuals' attitudes and considerations about the future were not largely influenced by the scenarios. Discussions revealed that the credibility of the projections depended on individuals' prior beliefs and their trust in the science portrayed