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Changing human landscapes under a changing climate: considerations for climate assessments
1Department of Geography, Michigan State University, 118 Geography Building, East Lansing, MI, 48824-1117, USA, perdinan@msu.edu.
Environmental Management
|July 26, 2013
Summary
Climate change assessments face challenges in strategy, spatial data, and uncertainty. A proposed hybrid approach combines top-down and bottom-up methods for better local adaptation strategies.
Area of Science:
- Environmental Science
- Climate Science
- Risk Assessment
Background:
- Climate change assessments are crucial for understanding impacts, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity in the Anthropocene.
- These assessments are complex and face significant challenges in their execution and interpretation.
- Key challenges include strategic choices, spatial data integration, observational constraints, and model uncertainties.
Purpose of the Study:
- To highlight critical challenges in climate change assessment strategies.
- To propose an integrated assessment strategy for local and regional adaptation planning.
- To identify areas requiring further research for improved climate assessment methodologies.
Main Methods:
- Review and identification of five challenging aspects of climate assessment.
- Development of a hybrid assessment strategy combining traditional "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches.
- Incorporation of uncertainties from climate observations, projections, and dependency models.
Main Results:
- Identified key challenges: assessment strategy, spatial linkages, observational constraints, ensemble interpretation, model uncertainty, and landscape influences.
- Proposed a hybrid "top-down" (uncertainty integration) and "bottom-up" (stakeholder knowledge) strategy for local/regional adaptation.
- Highlighted the need for new methods to integrate spatial interactions and landscape-climate dynamics under uncertainty.
Conclusions:
- Further research is essential to enhance climate assessment strategies and the utility of their findings.
- Improved methods are needed for spatial linkages, fine-grained local decision-making, and landscape-climate interactions.
- Clear communication of assessment design choices and their implications is vital for effective application.
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