Climate impact response functions as impact tools in the tolerable windows approach

Publication

A critical issue for policymakers in defining mitigationstrategies for climate change is the availability of appropriate evaluation tools. The development of climate impact response functions (CIRFs) is our reaction to this challenge.

CIRFs depict the response of selected climate-sensitive impactsectors across a wide range of plausible futures. They consist ofa limited number of climate-change-related dimensions andsensitivities of sector-specific impact models. The concept ofCIRFs is defined and the procedure to develop them is presented.

The use of climate change scenarios derived from various GCMexperiments and the adopted impact assessment models areexplained. The CIRFs presented here consider climate change impacts onnatural vegetation, crop production, and water availability. They are part of the ICLIPS integrated assessment framework based onthe tolerable windows approach. CIRFs can be applied both in`forward' and in `inverse' mode.

In the latter, they help totranslate thresholds for climate impacts perceived by stakeholders(so-called impact guardrails) into constraints for climatevariables (so-called climate windows). This enables the results ofdetailed impact models to be incorporated into intertemporallyoptimizing integrated assessment models, such as the ICLIPS model.

Authors

Fussel HM , Toth FL , Minnen JG van , Kaspar F

Specifications

Publication title
Climate impact response functions as impact tools in the tolerable windows approach
Publication date
14 February 2003
Publication type
Publication
Magazine
Clim Change 2003; 56:91-117
Product number
90993