ERMITAGE

Enhancing Robustness and Model Integration for The Assessment of Global Environmental Change

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'The development of interdisciplinary modelling tools and platforms to address the interactions between natural and socio-economic systems is an active research area in Europe. Nevertheless, notable gaps still exist in modelling capabilities, in particular, very little progress has been made to date in the direct coupling of models that resolve the spatial distribution of climate change with sectorally and regionally resolved economic models. Interactive couplings between climate and impact models are relatively underdeveloped. Likewise, the coupling of detailed economic models with impact and adaptation models is still at a relatively early stage. Finally, a coherent assessment of uncertainty is completely lacking in overall integrated assessments. The sustainability of agriculture and land-use policies and practices including water availability and the sustainability of climate policies that rely on high shares of bioenergy are critical applications that demand a spatially resolved representation of global environmental change including feedbacks between natural and socio-economic forces. ERMITAGE proposes to improve and extend existing modular frameworks for the coupling of intermediate complexity models of the natural and socio-economic systems to address the issues cited above. The resulting integrated assessment framework models will be applied to the analysis of post-2012 climate initiatives taking into account uncertainties and regional conflicts of interest in a coordinated way, propagating the analysis of uncertainty from climate simulation through to policy analysis, focusing particularly on the sustainability of agriculture, bioenergy and water resources.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

The world faces many complex environmental challenges. An EU-funded initiative has developed a software framework to improve the integration of environmental change and related policy models.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

In the 21st century the need to feed a rapidly growing population will place additional pressure on exploited land and water resources. Agriculture and fossil fuel use have led to the emission of greenhouse gases, thereby fuelling climate change and putting further pressure on ecosystems. In addition, rising standards of living may result in dietary changes, leading to an increased demand for land.

The project 'Enhancing robustness and model integration for the assessment of global environmental change' (http://ermitage.cs.man.ac.uk/ (ERMITAGE)) was established to help address these challenges. Aspects of the developed framework included transparency of methodologies, public engagement, relevance of results and applicability to sustainable development challenges.

Project partners built on existing platforms and technologies for coupling models by replacing complex computer codes with simpler models that are faster to compute. They also successfully carried out interactive coupling of complex climate change and economic and energy system models.

The resulting coupled models were used to study the impacts of climate change on heating and cooling demand. They also enabled analysis of the impact of sea-level rise and the structural changes required in order to comply with a global warming target of 2 degrees Celsius.

An additional development was coupling a groundwater recharge module to the land surface model. This allowed carrying out an analysis of the sustainability of groundwater extraction under future climate change.

A key finding was that it is economically viable to maintain terrestrial carbon stores in forest ecosystems whilst also increasing agricultural production. This is done to allow some cropland for growing biofuels while also providing for future food demand. In this scenario, the market value of bioenergy was dominated by its value as a carbon sink.

Results also showed that impacts on water and crop yields increased substantially for average global temperature rises of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. However, some areas received significant impacts to water resources at relatively low levels of average warming.

ERMITAGE therefore enabled the analysis of uncertainty from climate simulation through to policy analysis, with particular focus on the sustainability of agriculture, bioenergy and water resources. The project also developed web-based portals to provide access to climate data, models and results. These were designed for a range of users from the public via (http://climascope.tyndall.ac.uk (ClimaScope)) to policymakers and other scientific users.