Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Multi-sectoral vulnerability and risks
• Climate change impacts occurring outside Europe,
but with indirect cascading effects for regions,
sectors or people in European territory. An
example is the 2008 severe crisis of Australia's rice
production after six consecutive years of drought.
That crisis strongly contributed to a doubling of the
global market price for rice (Stephan and Schenker,
2012), in turn affecting European markets and
consumers.
• Climate change impacts within Europe that cross
national or regional borders, such as flood events
along major European rivers. The example of
recent floods events along the Danube show that
the severity of flood impacts and damages in one
location or European country is determined not
only by increasingly severe heavy precipitation
events but also by measures to reduce flood risk in
other locations or countries (Mabey et al., 2014).
The primary focus of this section is on the first
group, i.e. impacts occurring outside Europe but
with cascading effects for climate change risk and
vulnerabilities in European territory. Cross-border
effects within Europe are mentioned only if they
directly complement information from other parts
of the report, such as Section 4.4 (increasing threat
of invasive alien species), Section 5.2 (spread
of vector‐borne and water-borne diseases) and
Section 5.6 (changes in European tourism flows).
The current knowledge on European vulnerability to
climate change impacts that occur outside Europe
is mostly qualitative or case specific. While much
of the existing literature addresses the topic only
marginally or indirectly, recently a few assessments
with an explicit focus on cross-border impacts have
become available, such as a study commissioned
by the Directorate-General for Climate Action
(DG CLIMA) (Barnett et al., 2013), national studies
from the Netherlands (Vonk et al., 2015), Finland
(Groundstroem et al., 2015) and the United Kingdom
(Foresight, 2011; PwC, 2013; Challinor and Adger,
2016), and some work with a particular focus on
coastal areas (Nicholls and Kebede, 2012) and the
Adaptation Without Borders project (Benzie et al.,
2016). In addition, the IPCC AR5 provides information
in several of its chapters (Hewitson et al., 2014;
Oppenheimer et al., 2014). This section summarises
the current knowledge and is structured based on six
major pathways for which sufficient information is
available (see Figure 6.4).
Figure 6.4
Overview of major pathways of indirect impacts for Europe
Trade (non-agricultural commodities)
‐ Risks to raw materials supply
‐ Risks to manufacturing industry
‐ Improved Arctic sea transportation
Trade (agricultural commmodities)
‐ Global food price volatilities
‐ Reliability of supply and distribution
Infrastructure
‐ Risks to energy supply
‐ Vulnerable energy infrastructure
‐ Transportation network disruptions
Human mobility
- Changing tourism flows
‐ Climate‐induced migration
‐ Critical role of Africa
Geopolitical risks
- Climate and armed conflict
‐ Climate and security strategies
‐ Rights and access to Arctic resources
Finance
‐ Economic repercussions
of extreme events
‐ Insurance systems
Note:
Source:
The impact pathways have been placed arbitrarily on the map; therefore, the arrows do not indicate any predominant geographic
direction from which these impacts might affect Europe.
EEA.
Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report
289