Assessing climate change vulnerability in the arctic using geographic information services in spatial data infrastructures

Abstract

Timely knowing about climate change impacts is crucial to adequately plan and undertake adaptive measures and thus to effectively lower vulnerability. This requires gathering and integrating geographic information on exposure, local response mechanisms and stakeholders' concerns. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) are internet-based information systems that facilitate the exchange and use of distributed geographic information. This paper presents the application of SDI to climate change assessment by implementing a generic methodology for the quantification of vulnerability to climate change. The resulting integrated tool allows scientists, stakeholders and decision makers to communicate, assess and improve information about vulnerability to climate change. We show how emerging internet technologies and SDI in particular, make a new interactive approach of assessing vulnerability to climate change possible. Vulnerability was quantified based on an active stakeholder involvement by incorporating their varying perceptions, by allowing them to provide feedback and by supporting the acquisition of stakeholders' knowledge. However, the application showed that to be effective, efforts to achieve and maintain interoperability between the various scientific disciplines should be kept integrated within mainstream IT developments.

Vulnerability of European reindeer husbandry to global change

“…We model potential impacts through a variant of the 'tolerable windows' approach (Petschel-Held et al 1999;Bernard and Ostländer 2008). The degree to which an environmental factor disposes in favour of or against the activity of reindeer husbandry is assumed to be a monotonic function of the degree of exposure e, with an optimal value e opt and a pessimal value e pes .…”

Constraints-Driven Automatic Geospatial Service Composition: Workflows for the Analysis of Sea-Level Rise Impacts

“…Several works have addressed the construction of domain-specific applications by assembling and reusing geospatial tools and data as services [30,22,6], and many researchers followed the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Web Service standards [1] in order to increase discoverability and compatibility (e.g. [10,33,12]).…”

Potential impact of climate change on ecosystems of the Barents Sea Region

“…This was designed to be used by stakeholders and the interested public. The ADSS goes beyond the assessment of impact and can to some extent define the vulnerabilities to climate change (Bernard and Ostländer 2008). An alternative method of data integration is the Integrated Assessment Model (IAM), a numerical model that quantifies the impact of climate change on ecological and economic systems by simulating the terrestrial processes of the Barents Sea Region (Lange 2008).…”

“…The maps should enable integrated interpretation, thus paving the way to vulnerability analyses. The somewhat unusual projection (collection of maps) was used for two reasons: first, it follows an international standard (Bernard and Ostländer 2008) and, second, it is similar to that used in the stakeholder portal. The geographical context is illustrated in Fig.…”