ateam - Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

ATEAM final report Section 5 and 6 (2001-2004) 9
Section 6: Detailed report, related to overall project
duration
Please note: All Figures but Figure 1 are appended in Annex 3.
6.1 Background (description of the problem to be solved)
Over the next century society will increasingly be confronted with global changes such as population
growth, pollution, climate and land use change. By 2050, the human population will probably be larger
by 2 to 4 billion people. An increasing number of people, with increasing consumption of food and
energy per capita have boosted the emission of nitrogen to the atmosphere, resulting in eutrophication
of the environment via deposition. Furthermore, within the next decades the atmospheric carbon dioxide
concentration will at least double compared to pre-industrial times, while the global average surface
temperature is projected to increase by 1.4-5.8°C. Land use changes will have an immediate and strong
effect on agriculture, forestry, rural communities, biodiversity and amenities such as traditional
landscapes, especially in a continent as densely populated as Europe. Discoveries like these have led
to a growing awareness of our vulnerability to global change. In addition to immediate global change
effects on humans (e.g. hazards like floods or heat waves), an essential part of our vulnerability is due
to impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide. Information about possible environmental
impacts that matter to society can support planned adaptation. In a pan-European assessment of global
change vulnerability we therefore looked at ecosystems in terms of the services they provide to human
sectors, such as carbon storage, food production, biodiversity, scenic beauty, and many more.
Projection of socio-economic and biophysical variables to the next century cover a range of possible
futures, without assigning probabilities or likelihood to any individual scenario. To deal with this unknown
uncertainty, we based our global change projections on a range of coarse narratives, the so-called
marker scenarios, or IPCC 6 Special Report of Emission Scenarios (SRES) A1f, A2, B1 and B2. We
used four different general circulation models (GCMs) to simulate possible climatic changes resulting
from these four emission scenarios. We then developed a set of land use and nitrogen deposition
scenarios that are linked to the climate scenarios and the socio-economics derived from the SRES. This
resulted in a consistent set of scenarios at high spatial resolution for the main global change drivers in
Europe (10’ x 10’ grid for EU plus Norway and Switzerland). We used a set of state-of-the-art ecosystem
models to translate global change scenarios into potential environmental impacts. In a stakeholderguided
process we selected a range of indicators for ecosystem services that are related to the sectors
agriculture, forestry, carbon storage and energy, water, biodiversity and tourism.
To at least partly capture the ability of regions to adapt to changes we developed a spatially explicit
generic macro-scale index of adaptive capacity. Combining this index with our results on potential
environmental impacts we produced spatially explicit maps of vulnerability and its components for
multiple scenarios and time slices within the next century (10’ x 10’ grid resolution over EU15 plus
Norway and Switzerland, baseline 1990, future time slices 2020, 2050, 2080, scenarios based on the
Special Report of Emissions Scenarios A1fi, A2, B1, B2). The full range of environmental impact
scenarios from our pan-European assessment provides spatially explicit projections of ecosystem
services over time, while being honest about the attached uncertainties. The results add to the basis for
discussion between different stakeholders and policy makers, thereby facilitating sustainable
management of Europe’s natural resources under global change.
In the face of global change, these were the questions that drove our project:
• Which regions in Europe are most vulnerable to global change?
• Which scenario is the least harmful for a sector within Europe such as agriculture, forestry, etc.?
• Which sectors are the most vulnerable in a certain European region?
6 IPCC = The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.