Regional impacts and adaptation: new challenges for climate change reporting and synthesis

Since its formation in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced an extensive list of publications on various aspects of climate change. Working Group II of IPCC has focussed on impacts assessment, and the complex issue of adaptation. The 1998 report on regional impacts highlighted the need to look at how climate change scenarios would affect places, not just individual physical, biological or industrial attributes. Regional assessment is a challenge of integration of various attributes that make places unique. The relationship between regions and their respective climates can change over time because of technological, population and institutional changes, and because of adaptation to past climatic events. These relationships may also change in the future.

Within the Third Assessment Report (TAR), there will be a series of chapters in the Working Group II report devoted to regional impacts. The challenge will be to go beyond the 1998 report, particularly in describing economic and social impacts, and in synthesizing effects on sectors for each region (e.g. agriculture, water, ecosystems, forestry, health). In the chapter on North America, sub-regional cases will be used to describe unique synergistic effects that climate change could have in various parts of the continent. Some examples will be observed events that may serve as analogues, while others will come from scenario-based studies.

This exercise also provides an opportunity to broaden the scope of the impacts and adaptation discussion, and to link it with mitigation concerns that will be reviewed within Working Group III. Linkages between climate change and sustainable development are now being discussed within Working Groups II and III, and this could bring the climate change issue much closer to the broader concerns of global change. The challenge will be to bring together traditional scientific literature and non-traditional sources (e.g. regional economic and social development, international trade and aid, insurance), and to overcome obstacles of language and accessibility.