Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Introduction
1.1.2 Content and data sources
This report includes the following:
• an assessment of past and projected climate change
(Chapter 3), and its impacts on environmental
systems (Chapter 4) and society (Chapter 5) in
Europe, which is primarily based on indicators;
• a structured review of multi-sectoral climate change
impact, vulnerability and risk assessments for
ecosystem services (Section 4.5) and society at large
(Chapter 6); and
• an overview of the policy background for climate
change adaptation (Chapter 2) and the development
of the associated knowledge base (Chapter 7).
Important information in this report is highlighted in
'Key messages' at different levels. Chapters 1 and 2 do
not include key messages. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 include
key messages for each section and for each indicator.
Those key messages cover past trends, projections,
where relevant, attribution (see Section 1.3.2), and in
some cases, societal relevance. The key messages for
individual indicators are generally more detailed and
quantitative than the key messages for whole sections,
which form the basis for the Executive summary.
However, some overlaps between key messages at
different levels cannot be avoided. Chapter 6 includes
key messages for each section, and Chapter 7 includes
key messages covering the whole chapter.
Indicator-based assessment
The main content of this report, presented in
Chapters 3, 4 and 5, is about 40 indicators that describe
observed and projected climate change and its impacts
in Europe. Information for each indicator comprises
'Key messages', an explanation of its policy relevance,
and an analysis of past trends and future projections,
where available. Data quality issues and the main
uncertainties are generally discussed jointly for a group
of indicators. Some sections present information on
specific climate impacts even though data availability
and/or quality does not currently allow for an EEA
indicator to be developed based on this information.
All indicators in the EEA CCIV reports are available
on the EEA website ( 5 ) and accessible through the
European Climate Adaptation Platform (Climate‐ADAPT)
(see Section 1.1.4). About half of the 42 indicators
included in the 2012 report were updated online
in 2014, primarily to include new information from
the IPCC AR5, as well as from the Coupled Model
Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) and
Coordinated Downscaling Experiment — European
Domain (EURO-CORDEX) climate modelling initiatives.
The indicator base of the 2012 report was slightly
modified for this report, as described in Section 1.1.3
below.
Where feasible, indicators cover the 33 member
countries of the EEA. For some indicators, Europe-wide
data were not available, so these indicators present
information for fewer countries. Furthermore, some
indicators have only limited geographical relevance
(e.g. glaciers) and in such cases the aim was for full
coverage of the relevant countries and regions.
The observed and projected impacts of climate change
and society's vulnerability to them differ significantly
across Europe owing to regional differences in current
and future climate, as well as other environmental
and socio-economic factors. Wherever possible,
information on climate change and its impacts is
provided for different macro-regions in Europe.
Such regionalisation could be based on climatic,
geographic, environmental, political or other criteria,
but no generally accepted approach to regionalisation
exists. For pragmatic reasons, the regionalisation in
this report generally reflects that in the underlying
data source. As a result, some inconsistencies across
sections and indicators cannot be avoided.
An important question for the development of
adaptation strategies and actions is to which
magnitude and pattern of future climate change
should Europe adapt? As future levels of greenhouse
gas emissions and the resulting magnitude of global
climate change are uncertain, this report provides
impact projections for a range of emissions scenarios,
where available and relevant. Furthermore, climate
change and impact projections are based on an
ensemble of climate projections from different
models, whenever available. Further information on
global emissions scenarios and the consideration of
uncertainties in this report is provided in Sections 1.2
and 1.2.3, respectively.
The selection of topics and indicators for the
previous report (EEA, 2012a) was guided by an
expert assessment that applied 13 criteria grouped
into five themes: policy relevance; causal links to
climate change; methodological and data quality,
and data accessibility; robustness; and acceptance
( 5 ) http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/climate/indicators.
32 Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report