Written by Nereus Fellow Tyler Eddy,
I recently attended three related climate change impacts workshops in Europe from Sept 24th – Oct 3rd; two at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany looking at climate change impacts on land and sea, and one the following week at the Institute for Marine Science in Barcelona, Spain looking at climate change impacts in the oceans. I was representing FishMIP, a modelling group that I am a coordinator of, which aims to standardize how we make climate change projections for fisheries and marine ecosystems.
The goal of the workshops was to get climate change impacts modellers (the same Earth system models that meteorologists use to make weather forecasts) thinking about how to get different models to interact with each other. At present, there are individual models for agricultural crops, forests, groundwater, rivers, lakes, human health, terrestrial biodiversity, coastal infrastructure, energy, and fisheries and marine ecosystems. In reality, these systems are not independent of each other and there are feedbacks and interactions among them, such as how nutrients run off from agricultural land into rivers, lakes, and oceans. What impacts do these interactions have on the individual systems? During these meetings, we discussed how these processes are represented in the individual sectors, and how we might connect interactions among sectors moving forward.
Another important aspect of making climate change projections is how we represent different socio-economic scenarios, e.g. thinking about food projection on land and sea under climate change. Will there be more or less demand for capture fisheries and aquaculture based on future crop production? Incorporating this level of interaction is at the forefront of climate change impacts research and we are just taking the first steps to provide a more interdisciplinary understanding of not only the future oceans, but the future earth.
- ISIMIP Strategy Group Meeting. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany
- Planning session for cross-sectoral integration of ISIMIP-Agriculture research efforts in ISIMIP3 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany
- FishMIP workshop, ICM in Barcelona, Spain