Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Multi-sectoral vulnerability and risks
Under high vulnerability assumptions, almost 90 %
of the population is projected to be vulnerable to
at least one sector by 2050, and hotspot areas with
vulnerability to three or more sectors are found in
particular in southern and south-eastern Europe (Italy,
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece), but also on the
Iberian Peninsula and in parts of Scandinavia (see
right panel of Map 6.4). The apparent vulnerability
of Scandinavia is, however, strongly driven by the
assumption that a homogeneous landscape causes
vulnerability (Dunford et al., 2015). Therefore, the
large forested areas in Scandinavia that do not
have food production (agriculture) will appear as
vulnerable, even though the human population is
not necessarily greatly affected by all changes in the
forests.
These results stem from the CLIMSAVE project, which
has developed an integrated assessment platform
combining models for the six sectors 'agriculture',
'forestry', 'biodiversity', 'water', 'flooding' (coasts
and rivers) and 'urban' under different climate and
socio-economic scenarios for the 2020s and 2050s.
Note, however, that the definition of 'sectors' differs
partly from that used in the ISI-MIP study (Piontek
et al., 2014) and does not refer purely to economic
activities but also refers to particular processes
such as urban development, flooding or water
availability. The six ecosystem service indicators
were selected, with priority given to those that are
inherently cross‐sectoral (the sector is in brackets):
(1) 'food provision' (agriculture), (2) 'water exploitation
index' (water), (3) 'flood regulation index' (flooding),
(4) 'biodiversity index' (biodiversity), (5) 'land use
intensity' (agriculture/forests) and (6) 'landscape
diversity' (agriculture/forest/urban) (Dunford et al.,
2015).
The platform explicitly models the interdependencies
between the six sectors and has been made available
to the general public as a web-based explorative tool. It
contains climate scenarios for five climate models and
four SRES emissions scenarios (A1, A2, B1 and B2), and
for four stakeholder-derived CLIMSAVE socio‐economic
scenarios (Kok et al., 2015). The platform projects
impacts for a range of sectoral and ecosystem service
output indicators, six of which have been selected to
assess vulnerability (representing one key ecosystem
service indicator for each sector). For further
information on the potential consequences of climate
change on ecosystem services, including the CLIMSAVE
project and an IPCC literature review from its AR5, see
Section 4.5.
Vulnerability as depicted in Map 6.4 comprises the
following elements: (1) potential impact, (2) the level
of adaptation in place to reduce that impact and
(3) the societal coping capacity available to address
the impact that remains after adaptation. Thresholds
were specified for each element in order to determine
when vulnerability becomes an issue. Two summary
statistics, 'total vulnerable area' and 'number of
vulnerable people', were calculated and maps of
'hotspots' (see Map 6.4) were produced by spatially
overlaying the results for the six ecosystem services
(Dunford et al., 2015).
An analysis of cross-sectoral interdependencies
suggests that the sectors 'water', 'agriculture',
'forestry' and 'biodiversity' in particular are highly
sensitive to trends and changes in other sectors
(Kebede et al., 2015). This means that these four
sectors are very likely to be indirectly affected by
climate change through impacts in other sectors. The
CLIMSAVE assessment also confirms the crucial role
of non-climatic factors, such as changing land‐use
patterns or population changes, in determining overall
vulnerability and risk. For example, while flood risk
is projected to generally increase (except in parts of
eastern Europe) under climate-only assumptions,
the patterns of flood risk are more nuanced or even
diverging across European regions when different
socio-economic scenarios are taken into account
(Harrison et al., 2015). This shows that proactive
adaptation can reduce climate change vulnerability
(Jäger et al., 2015).
278 Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report