Search

The complex challenges arising from climate change that exceeds the +2 °C target (termed 'high-end climate change') in Europe require new integrative responses to support transformations to a more sustainable future. We present a novel methodology that combines transition management and high-end climate and socioeconomic change scenarios to identify pathways and move Europe closer to sustainability. Eighteen pathways have been co-created with stakeholders through a participatory process. The pathways support Europe in moving towards a desirable future vision, through top-down and bottom-up actions that lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduce impacts of and vulnerabilities to climate and socioeconomic changes and enhance well-being. Analysis shows that the pathways that are robust to future scenario uncertainty are those that shift Europe towards sustainable lifestyles, support and strengthen good governance for sustainability and promote adaptive resource management for water, agriculture and energy. The methodology can support the design of the urgent actions needed to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement and to transform Europe, in preparation for an uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paris Agreement established the 1.5 and 2 °C targets based on the recognition "that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change". We tested this assertion by comparing impacts at the regional scale between low-end (< 2 °C; RCP2.6) and high-end (> 4 °C; RCP8.5) climate change scenarios accounting for interactions across six sectors (agriculture, forestry, biodiversity, water, coasts and urban) using an integrated assessment model. Results show that there are only minor differences in most impact indicators for the 2020s time slice, but impacts are considerably greater under high-end than low-end climate change in the 2050s and 2080s. For example, for the 2080s, mitigation consistent with the Paris Agreement would reduce aggregate Europe-wide impacts on the area of intensive agriculture by 21% (on average across climate models), on the area of managed forests by 34%, on water stress by 14%, on people flooded by 10% and on biodiversity vulnerability by 16%. Including socio-economic scenarios (SSPs 1, 3, 4, 5) results in considerably greater variation in the magnitude, range and direction of change of the majority of impact indicators than climate change alone. In particular, socio-economic factors much more strongly drive changes in land use and food production than changes in climate, sometimes overriding the differences due to low-end and high-end climate change. Such impacts pose significant challenges for adaptation and highlight the importance of searching for synergies between adaptation and mitigation and linking them to sustainable development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertainties in our understanding of current and future climate change projections, impacts and vulnerabilities are structured by scientists using scenarios, which are generally in qualitative (narrative) and quantitative (numerical) forms. Although conceptually strong, qualitative and quantitative scenarios have limited complementarity due to the lack of a fundamental bridge between two different concepts of uncertainty: linguistic and epistemic. Epistemic uncertainty is represented by the range of scenarios and linguistic variables within them, while linguistic uncertainty is represented by the translation of those linguistic variables via the fuzzy set approach. Both are therefore incorporated in the models that utilise the final quantifications. The application of this method is demonstrated in a stakeholder-led development of socioeconomic scenarios. The socioeconomic scenarios include several vague elements due to heterogeneous linguistic interpretations of future change on the part of stakeholders. We apply the so-called 'Centre of Gravity' (CoG) operator to defuzzify the quantifications of linguistic values provided by stakeholders. The results suggest that, in these cases, uniform distributions provide a close fit to the membership functions derived from ranges of values provided by stakeholders. As a result, the 90 or 95% intervals of the probability density functions are similar to the 0.1 or 0.05 degrees of membership of the linguistic values of linguistic variables. By bridging different uncertainty concepts (linguistic and epistemic uncertainties), this study offers a substantial step towards linking qualitative and quantitative scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The majority of assessments of future heat-related health risk are based on projections of heat hazards superimposed solely on current socioeconomic conditions, thus neglecting the potential contribution of drivers of heat stress risk other than climate change. Partly to address this drawback, the climate change research community has developed a new scenario framework, made up of distinct sets of climate and socioeconomic scenarios. The few assessments of future heat-related health risk that have employed this new framework have focused on changes in population exposure but have often not accounted for future populations' vulnerability. In this paper, we combine European Shared Socioeconomic Pathways with Representative Concentration Pathways to provide spatially explicit European projections of heat-related health risk that account for multiple changes in both socioeconomic and climatic conditions. In doing so, we also address the challenge of accounting for projections of determinants of vulnerability under varying levels of socioeconomic development. Results reveal that the proportion of the European population at very high risk of heat stress will show a steady increase – from 0.4% currently to 20.3%, 32.6%, or 48.4% in 2050 depending on the scenario combination – unless substantial political changes occur rapidly and steadily shift the current socioeconomic development pathway towards sustainability. Ambitious mitigation policies associated with rapid technological progress to enhance human capital could also moderate future heat-related health challenges. Such challenges are unevenly spread across Europe, with the Mediterranean region and Scandinavia being respectively the most and the least impacted regions. Future heat-related health challenges are substantially influenced by varying levels of socioeconomic development, primarily through changes in vulnerability – changes in population exposure being only of secondary importance. The former may even have a more significant impact on future heat stress risk than climate change, particularly in the British Isles and in the Iberian Peninsula. Thus, there is an undeniable necessity to consider the future state of vulnerability – and its uncertainties under varying socioeconomic scenarios – when assessing future heat-related health challenges and designing health adaptation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]