Why regional studies are needed in the development of full-scale integrated assessment modelling of global change processes

Full-scale integrated assessment models (lAMs) allow many components of the global climate change problem to be examined in one framework. The chief advantage of the IAM approach over less complete modelling frameworks is that the socio-economic and environmental consequences of policy choices aimed at abating or adapting to climate change can be evaluated in their totality. However, the highly aggregate functional forms that lAMs currently embed are lacking in sufficient regional and sectoral detail to be totally credible. In this paper, ten reasons why regional studies are needed in support of the development of full-scale lAMs are given. A strategic cyclical scaling exercise involving regional and global integrated modelling frameworks is proposed.     

可计算一般均衡框架下的气候变化经济影响综合评估

气候变化是21世纪人类面临的重大挑战之一,并对自然系统和社会经济系统造成了各种负面影响。对气候变化的影响进行经济评估是气候变化研究中的重要问题。而可计算一般均衡框架下的综合评估模型（CGE_IAMs）是评估气候变化经济影响的有效手段之一,文中对气候变化影响经济评估的主要CGE_IAMs进行了文献调研,并对这些模型进行了比较分析。研究表明不同模型在温室气体排放、气候参数的处理方式以及气候影响的引入机制等方面有着较大区别,因而各模型对气候变化影响的经济评估结果也有一定的差异。此外,当前CGE_IAMs在评估气候变化经济影响时存在支撑数据未及时更新、方法不细致以及评估不全面等问题。未来该领域的相关研究应该更加关注于模型与支撑数据的精细化和开源化,此外还应加强CGE_IAMs中经济模块与复杂气候模式的耦合。     

Objective probabilities about future climate are a matter of opinion

In this paper, the unfeasibility of producing “objective” probabilistic climate change scenarios is discussed. Realizing that the knowledge of “true” probabilities of the different scenarios and temperature changes is unachievable, the objective must be to find the probabilities that are the most consistent with what our state of knowledge and expert judgment are. Therefore, subjective information plays, and should play, a crucial role. A new methodology, based on the Principle of Maximum Entropy, is proposed for constructing probabilistic climate change scenarios when only partial information is available. The objective is to produce relevant information for decision-making according to different agents’ judgment and subjective beliefs. These estimates have desirable properties such as: they are the least biased estimate possible on the available information; maximize the uncertainty (entropy) subject to the partial information that is given; The maximum entropy distribution assigns a positive probability to every event that is not excluded by the given information; no possibility is ignored. The probabilities obtained in this manner are the best predictions possible with the state of knowledge and subjective information that is available. This methodology allows distinguishing between reckless and cautious positions regarding the climate change threat.     

Learning with Local Help: Expanding the Dialogue on Climate Change and Water Management in the Okanagan Region, British Columbia, Canada

The research activity described in this report is a comprehensive regional assessment of the impacts of climate change on water resources and options for adaptation in the Okanagan Basin. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop integrated climate change and water resource scenarios to stimulate a multistakeholder discussion on the implications of climate change for water management in the region. The paper describes two main objectives: (a) providing a set of research products that will be of relevance to regional interests in the Okanagan, and (b) establishing a methodology for participatory integrated assessment of regional climate change impacts and adaptation that could be applied to climate-related concerns in Canada and other countries. This collaborative study has relied on field research, computer-based models, and dialogue exercises to generate an assessment of future implications, and to learn about regional views on the prospects for adaptation. Along the way, it has benefited from strong partnerships with governments, researchers, local water practitioners, and user groups. Building on the scenario-based study components, and a series of interviews and surveys undertaken for the water management and adaptation case study components, a set of stakeholder dialogue sessions were organized which focused on identifying preferred adaptation options and processes for their implementation. Rather than seeking consensus on the “best” option or process, regional interests were asked to consider a range of available options as part of an adaptation portfolio that could address both supply side and demand side aspects of water resources management in the Okanagan. The Canadian Crown reserves the right to retain a non-exclusive, royalty free licence in and to any copyright.     

Confronting the challenge of integrated assessment of climate adaptation: a conceptual framework

Key limitations of integrated assessment models (IAMs) are their highly stylized and aggregated representation of climate damages and associated economic responses, as well as the omission of specific investments related to climate change adaptation. This paper proposes a framework for modeling climate impacts and adaptation that clarifies the relevant research issues and provides a template for making improvements. We identify five desirable characteristics of an ideal integrated assessment modeling platform, which we elaborate into a conceptual model that distinguishes three different classes of adaptation-related activities. Based on these elements we specify an impacts- and adaptation-centric IAM, whose optimality conditions are used to highlight the types of functional relationships necessary for realistic representations of adaptation-related decisions, the specific mechanisms by which these responses can be incorporated into IAMs, and the ways in which the inclusion of adaptation is likely to affect the simulations’ results.     

Extending the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for sub-national impacts,adaptation, and vulnerability studies

The exploration of alternative socioeconomic futures is an important aspect of understanding the potential consequences of climate change. While socioeconomic scenarios are common and, at times essential, tools for the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and integrated assessment modeling research communities, their approaches to scenario development have historically been quite distinct. However, increasing convergence of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and integrated assessment modeling research in terms of scales of analysis suggests there may be value in the development of a common framework for socioeconomic scenarios. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways represents an opportunity for the development of such a common framework. However, the scales at which these global storylines have been developed are largely incommensurate with the sub-national scales at which impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and, increasingly, integrated assessment modeling studies are conducted. The objective of this study was to develop sub-national and sectoral extensions of the global SSP storylines in order to identify future socioeconomic challenges for adaptation for the U.S. Southeast. A set of nested qualitative socioeconomic storyline elements, integrated storylines, and accompanying quantitative indicators were developed through an application of the Factor–Actor–Sector framework. In addition to revealing challenges and opportunities associated with the use of the SSPs as a basis for more refined scenario development, this study generated sub-national storyline elements and storylines that can subsequently be used to explore the implications of alternative sub-national socioeconomic futures for the assessment of climate change impacts and adaptation.     

The economics of climate change impacts and policy benefits at city scale: a conceptual framework

Cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change and climate extremes in part because they concentrate many activities, people and wealth in limited areas. As a result they represent an important scale for assessment and understanding of climate change impacts. This paper provides a conceptual and methodological framework for urban economic impact assessment of climate change. The focus of the paper is on model-based analysis of future scenarios, including a framing of uncertainty for these projections, as one valuable input into the decision-making process. The paper highlights the main assessment difficulties, methods and tools, and selected examples across these areas. A number of challenges are unique to climate change impact assessment and others are unique to the problem of working at local scales. The paper also identifies the need for additional research, including the need for more integrated and systemic approaches to address climate change as a part of the urban development challenge as well as the need to assess the economic impacts of climate change and response policy at local scale.     

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

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.     

Linking global and local scales: designing dynamic assessment and management processes

This paper identifies challenges inherent in addressing multi-scale environmental problems, and outlines tentative guidelines for addressing such challenges and linking science and policy across scales. The study and practice of environmental assessment and management increasingly recognize the importance of scale and cross-scale dynamics in understanding and addressing global environmental change. These ongoing efforts, however, lack a systematic way of thinking about and addressing the challenges involved in integrating science and policy across multiple scales, for example, in the design of policy-relevant, scientific assessments of problems such as climate change. These challenges include matching scales of biogeophysical systems with scales of management systems, avoiding scale discordance (matching the scale of the assessment with the scale of management), and accounting for cross-scale dynamics. In this paper we propose tentative guidelines for meeting such challenges for both assessors and decision-makers: (1) utilize boundary organizations — institutions which serve to mediate between scientists and decision-makers, and between these actors at different scales; (2) utilize scale-dependent comparative advantages — coordinating the allocation of resources, technical expertise, and decision-making authority to best capitalize on scale-specific capabilities; and (3) employ adaptive assessment and management strategies — constructing long-term, iterative, experiment-based processes of integrated assessment and management.     

The UK Climate Change Programme and communication with local authorities

Drawing on results of a 2003 survey of environmental officers in every Local Authority (LA) in England and Wales, this paper assesses the reception and response of local government to the information being provided through the UK Climate Change Programme. Over three quarters of respondents (n=184) felt they did not have access to the best information about the impacts of climate change on their areas. Although up-to-date information is freely available from a number of official Government sources, those official sources are not consulted as consistently as the media or as intensively as the internet, despite being consistently regarded as much more accurate, credible, and appropriate to LA needs. We interpret this apparent contradiction between LA officer confidence in official sources and their relatively infrequent use as a consequence, first, of technical–cognitive and practical–temporal difficulties accessing and understanding official sources of climate change information and, second, of concerns about the practical relevance of that information for the administrative functions of local government and thus for any meaningful response by LAs to climate change. Our survey recorded considerable levels of stress, cynicism, and futility among LA officials that not only complicate communication efforts but also call into question the central assumption of the UK Climate Change Programme that simply making more locally specific information about climate change impacts available will motivate appropriate action.     

Climate Impact Response Functions as Impact Tools in the Tolerable Windows Approach

A critical issue for policymakers in defining mitigationstrategies for climate change is the availability ofappropriate evaluation tools. The development of climate impactresponse functions (CIRFs) is our reaction to this challenge.CIRFs depict the response of selected climate-sensitive impactsectors across a wide range of plausible futures. They consist ofa limited number of climate-change-related dimensions andsensitivities of sector-specific impact models. The concept ofCIRFs is defined and the procedure to develop them is presented.The use of climate change scenarios derived from various GCMexperiments and the adopted impact assessment models areexplained.The CIRFs presented here consider climate change impacts onnatural vegetation, crop production, and water availability. Theyare part of the ICLIPS integrated assessment framework based onthe tolerable windows approach. CIRFs can be applied both in`forward' and in `inverse' mode. In the latter, they help totranslate thresholds for climate impacts perceived by stakeholders(so-called impact guardrails) into constraints for climatevariables (so-called climate windows). This enables the results ofdetailed impact models to be incorporated into intertemporallyoptimizing integrated assessment models, such as the ICLIPS model.     

Carbon capture and storage: combining economic analysis with expert elicitations to inform climate policy

The relationship between R&D investments and technical change is inherently uncertain. In this paper we combine economics and decision analysis to incorporate the uncertainty of technical change into climate change policy analysis. We present the results of an expert elicitation on the prospects for technical change in carbon capture and storage. We find a significant amount of disagreement between experts, even over the most mature technology; and this disagreement is most pronounced in regards to cost estimates. We then use the results of the expert elicitations as inputs to the MiniCAM integrated assessment model, to derive probabilistic information about the impacts of R&D investments on the costs of emissions abatement. We conclude that we need to gather more information about the technical and societal potential for Carbon Storage; cost differences among the different capture technologies play a relatively smaller role.     

Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments: An Evolution of Conceptual Thinking

Vulnerability is an emerging concept for climate science and policy. Over the past decade, efforts to assess vulnerability to climate change triggered a process of theory development and assessment practice, which is reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This paper reviews the historical development of the conceptual ideas underpinning assessments of vulnerability to climate change. We distinguish climate impact assessment, first- and second-generation vulnerability assessment, and adaptation policy assessment. The different generations of assessments are described by means of a conceptual framework that defines key concepts of the assessment and their analytical relationships. The purpose of this conceptual framework is two-fold: first, to present a consistent visual glossary of the main concepts underlying the IPCC approach to vulnerability and its assessment; second, to show the evolution of vulnerability assessments. This evolution is characterized by the progressive inclusion of non-climatic determinants of vulnerability to climate change, including adaptive capacity, and the shift from estimating expected damages to attempting to reduce them. We hope that this paper improves the understanding of the main approaches to climate change vulnerability assessment and their evolution, not only within the climate change community but also among researchers from other scientific communities, who are sometimes puzzled by the unfamiliar use of technical terms in the context of climate change.     

IPCC AR6 WGI报告的背景、 架构和方法

IPCC第六次评估报告（AR6）第一工作组报告（简称报告）中提供了对气候系统和气候变化的最新物理解释,整合了来自古气候和仪器观测的多项证据、过程理解以及全球和区域的气候模拟,记录了气候科学的最新进展。报告旨在提供有关过去气候如何变化的事实,揭示人类活动在这些变化中所起的作用,并根据不同社会经济路径的排放情景对未来气候进行了预估。这些结果对于政策制定者来说很重要。它有助于减缓气候变化、根据灾害管理框架制定区域适应计划以及开展即将到来的2023年全球综合评估。本文聚焦该报告的背景、架构和方法,并介绍当前气候变化评估的主要进展。结果显示,与以前的评估报告相比,AR6提供了更综合实用的信息和认识,更加强调了区域气候变化,以及更好地约束了气候敏感度的估计。该报告最重要的结论之一是人类活动对气候变化的影响已从科学认知演变为不争的事实。     

A proposal for a new scenario framework to support research and assessment in different climate research communities

In this paper, we propose a scenario framework that could provide a scenario “thread” through the different climate research communities (climate change – vulnerability, impact, and adaptation - and mitigation) in order to support assessment of mitigation and adaptation strategies and climate impacts. The scenario framework is organized around a matrix with two main axes: radiative forcing levels and socio-economic conditions. The radiative forcing levels (and the associated climate signal) are described by the new Representative Concentration Pathways. The second axis, socio-economic developments comprises elements that affect the capacity for mitigation and adaptation, as well as the exposure to climate impacts. The proposed scenarios derived from this framework are limited in number, allow for comparison across various mitigation and adaptation levels, address a range of vulnerability characteristics, provide information across climate forcing and vulnerability states and span a full century time scale. Assessments based on the proposed scenario framework would strengthen cooperation between integrated-assessment modelers, climate modelers and vulnerability, impact and adaptation researchers, and most importantly, facilitate the development of more consistent and comparable research within and across these research communities.     

Vulnerability: A generally applicable conceptual framework for climate change research

The term ‘vulnerability’ is used in many different ways by various scholarly communities. The resulting disagreement about the appropriate definition of vulnerability is a frequent cause for misunderstanding in interdisciplinary research on climate change and a challenge for attempts to develop formal models of vulnerability. Earlier attempts at reconciling the various conceptualizations of vulnerability were, at best, partly successful. This paper presents a generally applicable conceptual framework of vulnerability that combines a nomenclature of vulnerable situations and a terminology of vulnerability concepts based on the distinction of four fundamental groups of vulnerability factors. This conceptual framework is applied to characterize the vulnerability concepts employed by the main schools of vulnerability research and to review earlier attempts at classifying vulnerability concepts. None of these one-dimensional classification schemes reflects the diversity of vulnerability concepts identified in this review. The wide range of policy responses available to address the risks from global climate change suggests that climate impact, vulnerability, and adaptation assessments will continue to apply a variety of vulnerability concepts. The framework presented here provides the much-needed conceptual clarity and facilitates bridging the various approaches to researching vulnerability to climate change.     

The concepts and development of a participatory regional integrated assessment tool

This paper provides an overview of the development of the ‘Regional Impact Simulator’ – a user friendly software tool designed to allow stakeholders to perform integrated assessments of the effects of climate and/or socio-economic change on the important sectors and resources of two contrasting UK regions. This includes the assessment of agriculture, water resources, biodiversity and coastal and river flooding. The tool arose from the need to further develop the methods applied in the earlier RegIS project, which was the first local to regional integrated assessment in the UK. The limitations of RegIS included very long run times, a limited number of simulations, incomplete linkages between models and no allowance for scenario uncertainty. Based upon the stakeholder needs identified within RegIS, a series of guiding principles were developed with Steering Committee stakeholders, which informed the concept of the ‘Regional Impact Simulator’ including functionality, appearance and complexity. An Integrated Assessment Methodology based upon the Drivers-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework facilitated the integration of multiple models, scenarios and datasets within the software interface. The development of the ‘Regional Impact Simulator’ provides a test-bed for further studies of stakeholder-led, regional, integrated assessment, and provides an opportunity to learn the many lessons in undertaking such studies.     

The bias of integrated assessment models that ignore climate catastrophes

Climate scientists currently predict there is a small but real possibility that climate change will lead to civilization threatening catastrophic events. Martin Weitzman has used this evidence along with his controversial “Dismal Theorem” to argue that integrated assessment models of climate change cannot be used to determine an optimal price for carbon dioxide. In this paper, I provide additional support for Weitzman’s conclusions by running numerical simulations to estimate risk premiums toward climate catastrophes. Compared to the assumptions found in most integrated assessment models, I incorporate into the model a more realistic range of uncertainty for both climate catastrophes and societal risk aversion. The resulting range of risk premiums indicates that the conclusions drawn from integrated assessment models that do not incorporate the potential for climate catastrophes are too imprecise to support any particular policy recommendation. The analysis of this paper is more straightforward and less technical than Weitzman’s, and therefore the conclusions should be accessible to a wider audience.     

基于VPN和多层次Web结构的纺织业ERP集成系统的设计

针对目前国内纺织企业信息管理系统的多样性和复杂性所造成的环境异构、信息异构的特点，给出一种新的基于VPN和多层次Web结构的纺织业ERP集成系统体系结构和安全技术解决方案，目的在于使国内纺织企业信息管理系统更加智能化、规范化、动态化、安全化，为企业合理高效利用资源、提升企业价值提供有效手段。