Informed selection of future climates

Arndt, Channing; Fant, Charles; Robinson, Sherman; Strzepek, Kenneth

doi:10.1007/s10584-014-1159-3

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…The inputs into the economywide model arrive in the form of distributions of annual weather shocks driven by a hybrid frequency distribution (HFD) of 6800 possible future climate outcomes (Schlosser and Strzepek 2013) summarized to 426 representative future climates using the approach described by Arndt et al (2014). These 426 climates are designed to represent the best possible approximation to the distribution of future climates given the information available today and under the assumption that global mitigation policy regimes fail to constrain emissions growth.…”

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confidence: 99%

Climate uncertainty and economic development: evaluating the case of Mozambique to 2050

Arndt

Thurlow

2014

Climatic Change

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We apply a probabilistic approach to the evaluation of climate change impacts in Mozambique. We pass a distribution of climate shocks through a series of structural biophysical models. The resulting joint distributions of biophysical outcomes are then imposed on a dynamic economywide model. This framework produces distributions of economic impacts of climate change thus identifying an explicit range of potential economic outcomes and associating probability levels with given sets of outcomes. For example, we find that the economy of Mozambique may be up to 13 % smaller in 2050 compared with a fictional no climate change scenario (and assuming global policy fails to constrain emissions growth). The probability of gross domestic product (GDP) declines of greater than 10 % is relatively small at 2.5 %. These large declines are principally the result of dramatic reductions in flood return periods. To 2050, about 70 % of future climates result in GDP losses of between zero and five percent. In about 9 % of cases, climate change shocks result in higher GDP outcomes. We conclude that, relative to current practice, this structural probabilistic approach provides (i) significantly more information to decision-makers, (ii) more detailed insight into the importance of various impact channels, and (iii) a more holistic and comprehensive approach for evaluating adaptation options.

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confidence: 99%

Climate uncertainty and economic development: evaluating the case of Mozambique to 2050

Arndt

Thurlow

2014

Climatic Change

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“…Due to computational limitations, running the full ensemble of 6,800 members is infeasible. For this reason, we use a Gaussian Quadrature approach, as described in [ 32 ], to produce a subset and respective weights that represent the full ensemble. The Gaussian Quadrature approach identifies a set of indices for the ensemble members, and then identifies a subsample of simulations for which the values of the identified indices are distributed similarly to that of the full ensemble.…”

Section: Models and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projections of Water Stress Based on an Ensemble of Socioeconomic Growth and Climate Change Scenarios: A Case Study in Asia

et al. 2016

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The sustainability of future water resources is of paramount importance and is affected by many factors, including population, wealth and climate. Inherent in current methods to estimate these factors in the future is the uncertainty of their prediction. In this study, we integrate a large ensemble of scenarios—internally consistent across economics, emissions, climate, and population—to develop a risk portfolio of water stress over a large portion of Asia that includes China, India, and Mainland Southeast Asia in a future with unconstrained emissions. We isolate the effects of socioeconomic growth from the effects of climate change in order to identify the primary drivers of stress on water resources. We find that water needs related to socioeconomic changes, which are currently small, are likely to increase considerably in the future, often overshadowing the effect of climate change on levels of water stress. As a result, there is a high risk of severe water stress in densely populated watersheds by 2050, compared to recent history. There is strong evidence to suggest that, in the absence of autonomous adaptation or societal response, a much larger portion of the region’s population will live in water-stressed regions in the near future. Tools and studies such as these can effectively investigate large-scale system sensitivities and can be useful in engaging and informing decision makers.

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“…The use of climate change projections from the entirety of the CMIP3 climate model collection is justified by the fact that projections of water scarcity are strongly influenced by the particular regional patterns of change these models produce under any given climate scenario (Arnell et al 2011, Gosling andArnell 2016). Then, for the sake of computational efficiency, a Gaussian quadrature procedure (Arndt et al 2015) is employed to produce a subset (539 and 630 members for UE and L2S, respectively) and corresponding weight for each ensemble member. The procedure ensures that the resulting reduced ensembles reproduce the distributional features of a set of highly relevant water-resource metrics (i.e.…”

Section: Models and Simulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of climate change policy on the risk of water stress in southern and eastern Asia

Gao

Schlosser

Fant³

et al. 2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

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The adequacy of freshwater resources remains a critical challenge for a sustainable and growing society. We present a self-consistent risk-based assessment of water availability and use under future climate change and socioeconomic growth by midcentury across southern and eastern Asia (SEA). We employ large ensemble scenarios from an integrated modeling framework that are consistent across the spectrum of regional climate, population, and economic projections. We find socioeconomic growth contributes to an increase in water stress across the entire ensemble. However, climate change drives the ensemble central tendency toward an increase in water stress in China but a reduction in India, with a considerable spread across the ensemble. Nevertheless, the most deleterious unabated climate-change impact is a low probability but salient extreme increase in water stress over China and India. In these outcomes, annual withdrawals will routinely exceed water-storage capacity. A modest greenhouse gas mitigation pathway eliminates the likelihood of these extreme outcomes and also benefits hundreds of millions of people at risk to various levels of water stress increase. Over SEA we estimate an additional 200 million people under threat of facing at least heavily water-stressed conditions from climate change and socioeconomic growth, but the mitigation scenario reduces the additional population-under-threat by 30% (60 million). Nevertheless, there remains a 1-in-2 chance that 100 million people across SEA experience a 50% increase in water stress and a 1-in-10 chance they experience a doubling of water stress. Therefore, widespread adaptive measures may be required over the coming decades to meet these unavoidable risks in water shortfalls.

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Informed selection of future climates

Cited by 11 publications

References 10 publications

Climate uncertainty and economic development: evaluating the case of Mozambique to 2050

Climate uncertainty and economic development: evaluating the case of Mozambique to 2050

Projections of Water Stress Based on an Ensemble of Socioeconomic Growth and Climate Change Scenarios: A Case Study in Asia

The impact of climate change policy on the risk of water stress in southern and eastern Asia

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