Browsing by Author "Papadimitriou, Lamprini"
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Item Open Access Changes in climate extremes, fresh water availability and vulnerability to food insecurity projected at 1.5° C and 2° C global warming with a higher-resolution global climate model(The Royal Society Publishing, 2018-04-02) Betts, Richard A.; Alfieri, Lorenzo; Bradshaw, Catherine; Caesar, John; Feyen, Luc; Friedlingstein, Pierre; Gohar, Laila; Koutroulis, Aristeidis; Lewis, Kirsty; Morfopoulos, Catherine; Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Richardson, Katy J.; Tsanis, Ioannis; Wyser, KlausWe projected changes in weather extremes, hydrological impacts and vulnerability to food insecurity at global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C relative to pre-industrial, using a new global atmospheric general circulation model HadGEM3A-GA3.0 driven by patterns of sea-surface temperatures and sea ice from selected members of the 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) ensemble, forced with the RCP8.5 concentration scenario. To provide more detailed representations of climate processes and impacts, the spatial resolution was N216 (approx. 60 km grid length in mid-latitudes), a higher resolution than the CMIP5 models. We used a set of impacts-relevant indices and a global land surface model to examine the projected changes in weather extremes and their implications for freshwater availability and vulnerability to food insecurity. Uncertainties in regional climate responses are assessed, examining ranges of outcomes in impacts to inform risk assessments. Despite some degree of inconsistency between components of the study due to the need to correct for systematic biases in some aspects, the outcomes from different ensemble members could be compared for several different indicators. The projections for weather extremes indices and biophysical impacts quantities support expectations that the magnitude of change is generally larger for 2°C global warming than 1.5°C. Hot extremes become even hotter, with increases being more intense than seen in CMIP5 projections. Precipitation-related extremes show more geographical variation with some increases and some decreases in both heavy precipitation and drought. There are substantial regional uncertainties in hydrological impacts at local scales due to different climate models producing different outcomes. Nevertheless, hydrological impacts generally point towards wetter conditions on average, with increased mean river flows, longer heavy rainfall events, particularly in South and East Asia with the most extreme projections suggesting more than a doubling of flows in the Ganges at 2°C global warming. Some areas are projected to experience shorter meteorological drought events and less severe low flows, although longer droughts and/or decreases in low flows are projected in many other areas, particularly southern Africa and South America. Flows in the Amazon are projected to decline by up to 25%. Increases in either heavy rainfall or drought events imply increased vulnerability to food insecurity, but if global warming is limited to 1.5°C, this vulnerability is projected to remain smaller than at 2°C global warming in approximately 76% of developing countries. At 2°C, four countries are projected to reach unprecedented levels of vulnerability to food insecurity. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The Paris Agreement: understanding the physical and social challenges for a warming world of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels’.Item Open Access Cross-sectoral and trans-national interactions in national-scale climate change impacts assessment—the case of the Czech Republic(Springer, 2019-09-16) Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Trnka, Miroslav; Harrison, Paula; Holman, Ian P.Assessing the combined impacts of future climate and socio-economic change at the country level is vital for supporting national adaptation policies. Here, we use a novel modelling approach to study the systemic impacts of climate and socio-economic changes on the Czech Republic, taking account of cross-sectoral interactions between agriculture, water, forestry, land-use and biodiversity, and, for the first time, trans-national interactions. We evaluate the national-level baseline results, scenario-neutral model sensitivities, and climate and socio-economic scenario impacts using a European-scale integrated modelling tool. Consistently across most climate and socio-economic scenarios, the Czech Republic is projected to have increasing importance as a crop-growing region in Europe, due to an increased competitive advantage within the continent. Arable land in the Czech Republic expands, at the expense of livestock farming and forestry, with associated impacts of increased water scarcity and reduced biodiversity for the country. Accounting for trans-national interactions in national-scale assessments provides more realistic assessments of impacts and helps to identify the changing role of the country within its regional and continental domain. Such improved understanding can support policy-makers in developing national adaptation actions that reduce adverse impacts and realise opportunities.Item Open Access Developing a water strategy for sustainable irrigated agriculture in Mediterranean island communities – Insights from Malta(Sage, 2019-04-07) Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Hallett, Stephen; Sakrabani, Ruben; Borg, Malcolm; Thompson, Andrew; Knox, Jerry W.The future sustainability of irrigated agriculture in Mediterranean island communities faces a raft of economic, environmental and socio-economic challenges. Many of these are inextricably linked to the extreme levels of water scarcity that exist in the region. With a focus on Malta, we developed a water strategy to identify the priorities for action to support decision makers, practitioners and the agrifood industry in achieving agricultural and water resources sustainability. The methodology involved a combination of evidence synthesis, to inform the development of a Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response framework. These priorities were then used to define a set of key actions under three thematic pillars of sustainability (environment, economy and society). Our analysis confirmed that irrigated agriculture in Malta is not only impacted by environmental factors such as the challenging climate and geography of the region but also strongly influenced by a range of economic (tourism development, European Union accession) and societal (population growth, environmental regulation) drivers of change. The developed strategy is underpinned by priority actions relating to improved water and soil management. The reduction of water and energy footprints in crop production, the establishment of demonstration farms and the support of policies that promote ‘value adding’ activities are examples of key priority actions for the environmental, economic and societal pillar, respectively. Regarding the scale of intervention, the analysis distinguishes research as being important for supporting many of the economy-focused actions.Item Open Access Global water availability under high-end climate change : A vulnerability based assessment(Elsevier, 2019-01-29) Koutroulis, Aristeidis; Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Grillakis, M.G.; Tsanis, I.K.; Warren, R.; Betts, R.A.Global sustainability is intertwined with freshwater security. Emerging changes in global freshwater availability have been recently detected as a combined result of human interventions, natural variability and climate change. Expected future socio-economic and climatic changes will further impact freshwater resources. The quantification of the impacts is challenging due to the complexity of interdependencies between physical and socio-economic systems. This study demonstrates a vulnerability based assessment of global freshwater availability through a conceptual framework, considering transient hydro-climatic impacts of crossing specific warming levels (1.5 °C, 2 °C and 4 °C) and related socio-economic developments under high-end climate change (RCP8.5). We use high resolution climate scenarios and a global land surface model to develop indicators of exposure for 25,000 watersheds. We also exploit spatially explicit datasets to describe a range of adaptation options through sensitivity and adaptive capacity indicators according to the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The combined dynamics of climate and socio-economic changes suggest that although there is important potential for adaptation to reduce freshwater vulnerability, climate change risks cannot be totally and uniformly eliminated. In many regions, socio-economic developments will have greater impact on water availability compared to climate induced changes. The number of people under increased freshwater vulnerability varies substantially depending on the level of global warming and the degree of socio-economic developments, from almost 1 billion people at 4 °C and SSP5 to almost 3 billion people at 4 °C and SSP3. Generally, it is concluded that larger adaptation efforts are required to address the risks associated with higher levels of warming of 4 °C compared to the lower levels of 1.5 °C or 2 °C. The watershed scale and country level aggregated results of this study can provide a valuable resource for decision makers to plan for climate change adaptation and mitigation actions.Item Open Access Multi-stakeholder analysis to improve agricultural water management policy and practice in Malta(Elsevier, 2019-11-26) D’Agostino, D.; Borg, M.; Hallett, Stephen H.; Sakrabani, Ruben; Thompson, Andrew; Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Knox, Jerry W.Malta faces a raft of water challenges which are negatively impacting on the sustainability of irrigated agriculture, and creating serious tensions with other sectors competing for water, including urban development, tourism and the environment. In this paper we argue for a transparent process centred on participatory stakeholder engagement to agree on the most challenging water-related risks and to identify solutions that both support the water governance framework and improve on-farm water management practices. Given Malta’s dependence on freshwater, this study focused on outdoor field-scale irrigated production. A three staged stakeholder-driven approach was developed. The first stage included Delphi analyses to identify the key constraints on water management and fuzzy cognitive mapping to enable stakeholders to analyse their mental models and formalise conceptual and causal relationships between different components impacting on Maltese agriculture. Secondly, questionnaires were used to inform understanding of national policy gaps in water management and thirdly, a “backcasting” stakeholder workshop was used to identify policy actions to achieve a more sustainable future for agriculture on the island. The study confirmed that Malta’s core challenge is tied to poor water governance and the need to define policies that are socially and environmentally acceptable and geared to tackling the complex water challenges the agricultural sector faces. Developing support for farmer training, knowledge translation, greater public awareness of the importance and value of water for high-value crop production and multi-sector collaboration to promote shared opportunities for water infrastructure investment were highlighted as potential solutions. The findings have direct relevance to other island communities where water scarcity poses serious agronomic risks to production and where agriculture underpins rural livelihoods and the economy.Item Open Access Simulating hydrological impacts under climate change: implications from methodological differences of a pan European assessment(MDPI, 2018-09-26) Koutroulis, Aristeidis; Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Grillakis, Manolis G.; Tsanis, Ioannis K.; Wyser, Klaus; Caesar, John; Betts, Richard AThe simulation of hydrological impacts in a changing climate remains one of the main challenges of the earth system sciences. Impact assessments can be, in many cases, laborious processes leading to inevitable methodological compromises that drastically affect the robustness of the conclusions. In this study we examine the implications of different CMIP5-based regional and global climate model ensembles for projections of the hydrological impacts of climate change. We compare results from three different assessments of hydrological impacts under high-end climate change (RCP8.5) across Europe, and we focus on how methodological differences affect the projections. We assess, as systematically as possible, the differences in runoff projections as simulated by a land surface model driven by three different sets of climate projections over the European continent at global warming of 1.5 °C, 2 °C and 4 °C relative to pre-industrial levels, according to the RCP8.5 concentration scenario. We find that these methodological differences lead to considerably different outputs for a number of indicators used to express different aspects of runoff. We further use a number of new global climate model experiments, with an emphasis on high resolution, to test the assumption that many of the uncertainties in regional climate and hydrological changes are driven predominantly by the prescribed sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea-ice concentrations (SICs) and we find that results are more sensitive to the choice of the atmosphere model compared to the driving SSTs. Finally, we combine all sources of information to identify robust patterns of hydrological changes across the European continent.Item Open Access SusHi-Wat: Output of Beas-Sutlej basins systems model(Cranfield University, 2018-11-28 11:43) Momblanch Benavent, Andrea; Holman, Ian; Papadimitriou, Lamprini; K. Jain, Sanjay; Kulkarni, Anil; SP Ojha, Chandra; J Adeloye, AdebayoThis work has been developed under the project 'Sustaining Himalayan Water Resources in a Changing Climate' (SusHi-Wat), which aims at improving understanding of how water is stored in, and moves through, a Himalayan river system in northern India (the inter-linked Beas and Sutlej catchments) and develop and test a robust model of the whole system that can be used to inform current and future decision making to support the sustainable development and management of the region's water resources.The dataset contains the monthly time series of selected output of a water resource systems model built with the Water Evaluation And Planning (WEAP) software for the Beas and Sutlej basins, under different climate and socio-economic scenarios. It was used to derive the results presented in the paper "Untangling the water-food-energy-environment nexus for global change adaptation in a complex Himalayan water resource system", https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.11.045.Detailed description of the files:'0.Runoff summary.xlsx' - Monthly time series of the total runoff generated upstream Pong and Bhakra reservoirs for the baseline scenario and two climate change scenarios. The column headings correspond to different sub-basins and elevation bands as described in the corresponding paper.'1.WEAP results_Baseline.xlsx'; '1.WEAP results_CC3&SSP1.xlsx'; '2.WEAP results_CC3&SSP2.xlsx'; '3.WEAP results_CC3&SSP5.xlsx'; '4.WEAP results_CC7&SSP1.xlsx'; '5.WEAP results_CC7&SSP2.xlsx'; '6.WEAP results_CC7&SSP5.xlsx' - Monthly time series of several WEAP outputs under different climate and socio-economic change scenarios, i.e. urban demand supply coverage, irrigation demand supply coverage, hydropower energy production, water stored in reservoirs, river flows downstream Pandoh dam, glacier depth, total runoff, snow melt runoff, ice melt runoff, actual evapotranspiration. The column headings correspond to water demands, management infrastructures and sub-basins and elevation bands as described in the corresponding paper.Item Open Access Trade-offs are unavoidable in multi-objective adaptation even in a post-Paris Agreement world(Elsevier, 2019-08-21) Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Holman, Ian P.; Dunford, Robert W.; Harrison, Paula A.In a post-Paris Agreement world, where global warming has been limited to 1.5 or 2 °C, adaptation is still needed to address the impacts of climate change. To reinforce the links between such climate actions and sustainable development, adaptation responses should be aligned with goals of environmental conservation, economic development and societal wellbeing. This paper uses a multi-sectoral integrated modelling platform to evaluate the impacts of a + 1.5 °C world to the end of the 21st century under alternative Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) for Europe. It evaluates the ability of adaptation strategies to concurrently improve a range of indicators, relating to sustainable development, under the constraints imposed by the contrasting SSPs. The spatial synergies and trade-offs between sustainable development indicators (SDIs) are also evaluated across Europe. We find that considerable impacts are present even under low-end climate change, affecting especially biodiversity. Even when the SDIs improve with adaptation, residual impacts of climate change affect all the SDIs, apart from sustainable production. All but one of the adaptation strategies have unintended consequences on one or multiple SDIs, although these differ substantially between strategies, regions and socio-economic scenarios. The exception was the strategy to increase social and human capital. Other strategies that lead to successful adaptation with limited unintended consequences are those aiming at adoption of sustainable behaviours and implementation of sustainable water management. This work stresses the continuing importance of adaptation even under 1.5 °C or 2 °C of global warming. Further, it demonstrates the need for policy-makers to develop holistic adaptation strategies that take account of the synergies and trade-offs between sectoral adaptation strategies, sectors and regions, and are also constrained by scenario context to avoid over-optimistic assessments.Item Open Access Untangling the water-food-energy-environment nexus for global change adaptation in a complex Himalayan water resource system(Elsevier, 2018-11-08) Momblanch, Andrea; Papadimitriou, Lamprini; Jain, Sanjay K.; Ojha, Chandra S. P.; Adeloye, Adebayo J.; Holman, Ian P.Holistic water management approaches are essential under future climate and socio-economic changes, especially while trying to achieve inter-disciplinary societal goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of clean water, hunger eradication, clean energy and life on land. Assessing water resources within a water-food-energy-environment nexus approach enables the relationships between water-related sectors to be untangled while incorporating impacts of societal changes. We use a systems modelling approach to explore global change impacts on the nexus in the mid-21st century in a complex western Himalayan water resource system in India, considering a range of climate change and alternative socio-economic development scenarios. Results show that future socio-economic changes will have a much stronger impact on the nexus compared to climate change. Hydropower generation and environmental protection represent the major opportunities and limitations for adaptation in the studied system and should, thereby, be the focus for actions and systemic transformations in pursue of the SDGs. The emergence of scenario-specific synergies and trade-offs between nexus component indicators demonstrates the benefits that water resource systems models can make to designing better responses to the complex nexus challenges associated with future global change.