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Methodological framework of the PESETA project on the impacts of climate change in Europe

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Abstract

The PESETA project makes a high-resolution integrated assessment of the effects of climate change in Europe in the following impact categories: agriculture, river floods, coastal systems, tourism and human health. Many relevant methodological decisions underlie the multi-disciplinary assessment, such as the selection of the climate scenarios and the economic valuation of the physical impacts. The main purpose of this article is to document the methodological framework of the PESETA project, identifying also where further research is required. How the different sources of uncertainty have been addressed in the project is explicitly analysed, including the climate change scenarios and the various sectoral methodologies.

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Notes

  1. In this article, it is argued that all the sectoral impact models are physical in the sense that they model variables expressed in physical units, versus in economic units. However, the tourism and human health models are based on statistical relationships, even if modelling physical variables (bed nights in the case of the tourism model and mortality in the case of the human health model).

  2. The human health impact category does not appear in Fig. 1 because its results were not integrated into the CGE model.

  3. The IPCC criteria are: consistency with global projections (scenarios should be consistent with a broad range of global warming projections based on increased concentrations of greenhouse gases); physical plausibility (scenarios should be physically plausible; that is, they should not violate the basic laws of physics); applicability in impact assessments (scenarios should describe changes in a sufficient number of variables on a spatial and temporal scale that allows for impact assessment); representative (scenarios should be representative of the potential range of future regional climate change); and, accessibility (scenarios should be straightforward to obtain, interpret and apply for impact assessment).

  4. Economist call this approach ‘comparative statics’.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees and the members of the PESETA Advisory Board (in particular, Tim Carter) for their many useful remarks and comments. The PESETA project was entirely financed by the Joint Research Centre, which is acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Lyngbyvej 100, 2100, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark

    Ole B. Christensen

  2. Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

    Clare M. Goodess

  3. Joint Research Center (JRC), European Commission, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), Seville, Spain

    Juan-Carlos Ciscar

Authors
  1. Ole B. Christensen
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  2. Clare M. Goodess
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  3. Juan-Carlos Ciscar
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Correspondence to Ole B. Christensen.

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The views expressed are purely those of Juan-Carlos Ciscar and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission.

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Christensen, O.B., Goodess, C.M. & Ciscar, JC. Methodological framework of the PESETA project on the impacts of climate change in Europe. Climatic Change 112, 7–28 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0337-9

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