Climate change impact modelling needs to include cross-sectoral interactions

Abstract

Climate change impact assessments often apply models of individual sectors such as agriculture, forestry and water use without considering interactions between these sectors. This is likely to lead to misrepresentation of impacts, and consequently to poor decisions about climate adaptation. However, no published research assesses the differences between impacts simulated by single sector and integrated models. Here we compare 14 indicators derived from a set of impact models run within single sector and integrated frameworks across a range of climate and socio-economic scenarios in Europe. We show that single sector studies misrepresent the spatial pattern, direction and magnitude of most impacts because they omit the complex interdependencies within human and environmental systems. The discrepancies are particularly pronounced for indicators such as food production and water exploitation which are highly influenced by other sectors through changes in demand, land suitability and resource competition. Furthermore, the discrepancies are greater under different socio-economic scenarios than different climate scenarios, and at the sub-regional rather than Europe-wide scale.

Assessing the impacts of 1.5 °C global warming – simulation protocol of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP2b)

“…the watersector models do not use LU changes from the biome-sector models, and in turn the crop-sector models do not use runoff from the water-sector models, etc. Running impact models in isolation from one another can ignore complex interdependencies which in turn can be detrimental to the representation of spatial patterns in climate change impacts, as well as their sign and magnitude of change (Harrison et al, 2016). En- hancing cross-sectoral integration has been one of the driving forces behind the development of the ISIMIP2b protocol, so we anticipate that the simulations which arise from it will yield some of the most cutting-edge projections of climate change impacts to date.…”

To what extent are land resource managers preparing for high-end climate change in Scotland?

“…Harrison et al 2016). Such decision-centred, cross-sectoral examples of how to successfully adapt are considered salient for adaptation decision-making Harrison et al 2015;Jäger et al 2015;Skourtos et al 2015).…”

Future supply and demand of net primary production in the Sahel

“…As the goal of exploratory frameworks is not prediction, they often employ parsimonious or simplified versions of more complex models (often referred to as metamodels in the latter case) that run across a range of scenarios (e.g. Harrison et al, 2016). Another benefit of using such simplified models is the ease with which they can be coupled to other sectoral models (e.g.…”