Using climate analogues for assessing climate change economic impacts in urban areas

Abstract

This paper aims at proposing a way to get round the intrinsic deadlocks of the economic assessment of climate change impacts (absence of consistent baseline scenario and of credible description of adaptation behaviours under uncertainty). First, we use climate scenarios from two models of the PRUDENCE project (HadRM3H and ARPEGE) to search for cities whose present climates can be considered as reasonable analogues of the future climates of 17 European cities. These analogues meet rather strict criteria in terms of monthly mean temperature, total annual precipitations and monthly mean precipitations. Second, we use these analogues as a heuristic tool to understand the main features of the adaptation required by climate change. The availability of two analogues for each city provides a useful estimate of the impact of uncertainty on the required adaptation efforts. Third, we carry out a cost assessment for various adaptation strategies, taking into account the cost of possible ill-adaptations due to wrong anticipations in a context of large uncertainty (from sunk-costs to lock-in in suboptimal adaptation choices). We demonstrate the gap between an enumerative approach under perfect expectation and a calculation accounting for uncertainty and spillover effects on economic growth.

Evolution of the Parisian urban climate under a global changing climate

“…Recently, some future urban climate projections have been produced in order to tackle different issues such as frequency of heat days (García Cueto et al 2010;Früh et al 2011), UHIs (Wilby 2003), air pollution (Athanassiadou et al 2010), urban water supply (O'Hara and Georgakakos 2008), energy consumption (Amato et al 2005;Franco and Sanstad 2008), or economic impacts (Hallegatte et al 2007). Most of these works produce local-scale projections by applying statistical downscaling techniques to global climate model's (GCM) outputs, and evaluate the impacts in a simple way without modeling the city itself.…”

The meteorological framework and the cultural memory of three severe winter-storms in early eighteenth-century Europe

“…At the same time, such shortcomings in the cultural memory also prevent an appropriate assessment of present and future storm risks that to some extent hinges on the knowledge of past events. Economists (Freeman et al 2002;Stern 2006;Hallegatte et al 2007) stress that we need to explore disasters of the past in order to obtain real data and information instead of relying on model results. History is always present-day history in the sense that it weds the wealth of past experience to the issues that are relevant for the respective present.…”

Global warming and Australian public health: reasons to be concerned

“…Along with improved air conditioning practices is the need to install air conditioning in all dwelling types and in public places. 64 Furthermore, an upgrade of Australian building materials and standards for housing to make them "less vulnerable to high temperatures and provide air conditioning at low costs" is needed. 64 Organisations are "primary socio-economic units" in which public health adaptation will take place.…”

“…64 Furthermore, an upgrade of Australian building materials and standards for housing to make them "less vulnerable to high temperatures and provide air conditioning at low costs" is needed. 64 Organisations are "primary socio-economic units" in which public health adaptation will take place. 65 Business routines can be modified or adapted to novel situations such as ongoing climate change, however feedback mechanisms which demonstrate adaptation to climate change may be weak.…”