Download Climate change impacts and water in Western

Climate change impacts and water
in Western Balkan
Blaz Kurnik
EEA
+
colleagues from ETC
Outline
• Introduction
• Climate impacts and water extremes (from past to
future)
• Assessing tools for climate prediction and impact
modelling (simplicity vs. complexity)
• Preliminary results
• Conclusions
Report about climate impacts and
vulnerability in Europe
Water related natural hazards (e.g. droughts and
water scarcity)
Water related natural hazards (e.g. floods)
Simple indices vs. water balance model
The SPI is an index based on the probability of
recording a given amount of precipitation, and the
probabilities are standardized so that an index of zero
indicates the median precipitation amount
A physically based distributed rainfall-runoff
model programmed in a dynamic GISlanguage
McKee et al. 1993
Easy to compute (historical and
operational precipitation data)
Drought is calculated using only
precipitations
Calculation of the soil moisture – important
drought indicator
Complex model which needs a lot of validation
and calibration for different regions
Impact models (components of water cycle
modelling)
Inter- linkages
and feedback
effects
Trends in European precipitation
Precipitation trends
Variability of rainfalls in last 100 years
Trends in droughts
Europe
droughts
droughts
South Eastern Europe
Impact
models
Climate
model
Climate projections and impact models
Trends in droughts
Europe
SE Europe
Average drought conditions in the future
climate
Europe
SE Europe
95th
75th
50th – mean
25th
5th
Scenarios:
Scenario 1: The good society in Balkan (low climate change impacts in the region, sustainable
economic development), state in 2060
Scenario 2: yes, we can! Technogarden in Balkans (high climate change impacts in the
region, sustainable economic development )- state in 2060
Scenario 3: Run to the hills (low climate change impacts in the region, un-sustainable
economic development )- state in 2060
Scenario 4: downward spiral (high climate change impacts in the region, un-sustainable
economic development ) - state in 2060
Changes in water extremes - droughts
Changes in surface run-off
Changes in surface run-off
Intermediate conclusions and way forward
• Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are important tool to assess
future climates at the regional level;
• socio - economic scenarios are very important factor in predicting
climate associated risks;
• strong agreement among scenarios and RCMs for drought
occurrence in southern Europe;
• weaker agreement among scenarios and models concerning
surface run-off;
Intermediate conclusions and way forward
• Presented results are based on on-going work and need to be
carefully studied;
• clear definition of the criteria on which land cover scenario are
based;
• need for using larger ensemble of the regional climate models
(based on the local knowledge) – regional cooperation;