CLIMSAVE is an EC-funded FP7 pan-European project (January 2010 - October 2013) that is developing a user-friendly, interactive web-based tool to assess the impacts and vulnerability of climate change in a number of sectors. The project involves 18 partners from 13 different countries in Europe, as well as from China and Australia.
The overall aim of the CLIMSAVE project is to deliver an integrated assessment methodology, an Integrated Assessment Platform (IAP), that will allow stakeholders (such as academic, governmental, professional, etc.) to assess climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptations across a range of sectors, including agriculture , biodiversity , coastal environments , forests , urban development , and water resources . All of these sectors are interlinked, and presently there is little understanding of how the impacts of climate change in one sector will affect another.
The IAP is being developed initially for Europe. It is also being tailored to a Scottish context to test regional applications of the approach. The platform integrates 10 different sectoral meta-models implemented as a Dynamic-Link Libraries (DLL). It provides important sectoral and cross-sectoral insights to explore ‘what if's' under different futures of climate change and policy options, such as how best to adapt or mitigate climate change. This will help policy and decision makers make more reliable choices based on real scientific information. It will also help them better to understand the complex issues associated with adapting to climate change. The CLIMSAVE IAP tool is novel and powerful because it: (a) considers the combined effects of both climate change and socio-economic factors and (b) assesses cross-sectoral impacts by integrating six different key sectors in Europe and Scotland with increased level of details than previous studies.
The team ( Robert Nicholls and Abiy Kebede ) at the University of Southampton, and also Mustafa Mokrech (now at the University of Houston) are involved in assessing impacts on people and properties on the coast, as well as floodplain habitats under a changing climate. They are developing the Coastal-Fluvial Flood (CFFlood) meta-model within the CLIMSAVE IAP using an integrated methodological framework, which will allow users to investigate the cross-sectoral socio-economic and environmental impacts of future flooding under a wide range of climate and socio-economic scenarios and to explore the scope of adaptation in Europe and Scotland. Prof Robert Nicholls , together with PhD student Abiy Kebede are also investigating ways to adapt to climate change across different sectors, by identifying and analysing the key impacts and metrics. They are undertaking this by looking at the sensitivity of various impacts to different climate and socio-economic scenarios, considering important cross-sectoral linkages and feedback. This helps to identify what drives changes in our environment, and this helps to prioritise adaptation responses to effectively reduce future impacts.
