By SARAH WILD
In the frozen reaches of Greenland, fissures in the ice sheet mark the battle lines in the fight against climate change. Greenhouse gases (GHG) are increasing global temperatures, melting ice and driving more icebergs to break away from glaciers and ice sheets. If the ice melts and the water enters the ocean, it will increase sea level rise, putting millions of people living in low-lying coastal areas around the world at risk.
The Greenland ice sheet has stored the equivalent of seven meters of sea level rise, while the Antarctic ice sheet has about 60 meters, and their rate of melting depends on various factors, including how quickly the GHG reduction in man.
‘It is more or less certain that we will not escape from two meters of sea level rise,’ said Gaël Durand, an ice specialist at the Université Grenoble-Alpes in France. ‘The question now is “When will this happen?” Will it happen in 100 years or in 2000 (years)?’
This question, how much and when, is not a simple question — but the answer is crucial for humanity to adapt to climate change. Unlike mitigation, which refers to the reduction of GHG emissions, climate adaptation aims to build resilience to the inevitable effects of a changing climate. But to adapt, decision makers need reliable information on what will happen to the climate in different regions.
This is where climate forecasts and projections from scientific research play an important role: forecasts attempt to provide short-term estimates – for example, the average annual or seasonal temperature over five years; while projections extrapolate what might happen in the long term, under different possible futures, determined by more or less ambitious mitigation responses.
In the EU-funded PROTECT project, Durand and colleagues are working on projections, to more accurately determine what will happen to the ice sheets in a warming world and how this will affect the communities living in coastal areas.
Beach users
‘We want to provide projections, but we want to make sure that these projections match the needs of users, especially coastal users,’ said Durand.
More than 200 million Europeans live within 50 km of the coast, but rising sea levels will affect everyone differently. ‘Usually the needs are very different, depending on your use of the coastal land,’ explains Durand.
Using satellite and remote sensing data, as well as ice sheet data, the PROTECT project models how the behavior of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, as well as the glaciers, affects people on a regional and even local scale, which there are case studies in France , the Netherlands, Greenland, and the Maldives (in the Indian Ocean). ‘We are working with stakeholders and practitioners to better understand what kind of projections they need,’ said Durand.
The co-design with users is a part of another project funded by the EU, the European Climate Prediction System (EUCP), this one focuses on predictions. Previously, ‘it was often the climate scientist who spoke and the user who listened’, said Jason Lowe, science lead for the project and the UK Met Office’s principal partner and head of climate services for the government. ‘But we realize that successful projects are when the user speaks more and the climate scientist listens and adapts to that.’
Innovation in knowledge production
For example, users asked, ‘What does (climate change) mean for adaptation in cities? What does it mean to be in water? What does coastal protection mean?’ Lowe said.
‘You need different kinds of information to figure out the solution.’
The EUCP brings together users and organizations interested in climate predictions, as well as superusers with specific problems to solve, to see how climate science can improve their adaptation strategies.
With their needs in mind, the project developed new methods to make more accurate decade-timescale predictions. The EUCP contributes to the World Meteorological Organization’s decadal forecast exchange and produces new data that informs the sixth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Flash flooding
‘So if they’re looking at flash flooding, if they’re designing drainage systems, for example, this data is available as a result of the EUCP.’
While the project mainly focuses on temperature and precipitation, it has also been able to predict storm tracks across the Caribbean and investigate drought, which occurs when wind speeds are low, in France.
However, beyond the successful predictions, it is the new methods that will be the most important legacy of the project, says Lowe.
A new approach is the ability to combine different global climate models, giving more accurate models more weight than those that are less accurate in a scenario. “We did the first comparison of different methods to weight the projections,” Lowe said.
The EUCP Atlas of climate projections provides pre-processed projections for Europe, and facilitates comparison between them.
Linking forecasts and projections
The project team also developed a way to link the forecasts to higher projections. This method, which allows people to link decadal predictions to longer term climate projections, will also be one of the lasting legacies of the project, according to Lowe.
With additional work to be done on decadal climate predictions and projections, the EUCP will be followed by the ASPECT project (which is Adaptation-oriented Seamless Predictions of the European ClimaTe), due to start next year. This ongoing effort is expected to improve our ability to predict far into the future.
“We also think that we can implement the idea of incorporating predictions into planning, and move it from something that is of academic interest to something that can be used in climate services,” he said. Climate services provide climate information that allows people and organizations to organize their activities and adapt to climate change.
Although humans are cutting their emissions, the climate is already changing and people around the world must adapt. To do this, they need important and unbiased information provided by projects such as PROTECT and EUCP.
The research in this article was funded through the EU. This material was originally published on horizonthe EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
EU MISSION: ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Whether it’s forest fires, floods or droughts, the consequences of climate change are already upon us, and Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average.
Adapting to climate change means taking action now to prepare for the current and future impacts of climate change.
The Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change focuses on supporting EU regions, cities and local authorities in their efforts to build resilience against the effects of climate change.
