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To adapt or not to adapt? Towards local costing of climate change impacts for decision making in adaptation

This content has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text. 2009 IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 6 322006 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1755-1315/6/32/322006) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more

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Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 6 (2009) 322006

IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1307/6/2/322006

S32.06 To adapt or not to adapt? Towards local costing of climate change impacts for decision making in adaptation Alistair Hunt, T Taylor University of Bath, DEID, Bath, UK Study objectives: The primary objective of this paper is to provide first quantitative estimates of the economic welfare costs (benefits) projected to face specific stakeholders at a local (sub-regional) scale, within the UK. The purpose of generating such estimates is to illustrate to the stakeholders the potential magnitude of costs associated with climate change in the absence of adaptation and thus the benefits to be gained from taking adaptive action. We also test the robustness of specific methodological components, including the application of down-scaled climate scenarios that incorporate changes in climatic means and extremes, a baseline that incorporates socio-economic change, and the transfer of economic values derived from non-market measures. Little work has previously been undertaken that adopts such a rigorous, quantitative approach, even less with stakeholder involvement. This research therefore seeks to redress this. Method: The impacts we study – and the primary stakeholder - include: • Road maintenance in summer (to address subsidence) and winter (salting to address icing) in Cambridgeshire - Cambridgeshire County Council • Domestic property subsidence - Association of British Insurers • Historic garden maintenance in Cornwall (lawn mowing and pest control) - National Trust The generic framework we applied is presented below. We estimate the costs of the climate change impacts - the red line above - under alternative socio-economic scenarios (SES), and separate out the contribution to the total impact costs of socio-economic change from the purely climate–induced impact.

Figure 1. Climate Change Impact and Adaptation Costs: A Simplified framework

Four climate scenarios to 2100 for the UK were used, (Hulme et al 2002), that correspond with the A1F1, A2, B2 and B1 IPCC SRES. Use of the estimates of changing event frequency probabilities enabled us to estimate expected values. The subsidence and health impacts listed above are quantified by adopting the hot, dry summer of 2003 in Europe as an historic analogue for the weather event that is expected to occur with increasing frequency under future climate scenarios. The impacts on historical garden maintenance and winter road salting are quantified using changes in mean temperature projected under the climate scenarios, combined with recent historical data on resource costs under “non-climate change” conditions. The study explicitly recognises the role of non-climate, socio-economic, factors such as demographics, social institutions, income and distribution, education levels, infrastructure and technology, knowledge and skills, and behaviour. SES (UKCIP 2001) are used to determine a) the evolution of the ‘stock-at-risk’ to a particular climate hazard at a specific location over time; b) the evolution of ‘prices’ over time, and c) alternative ways in which the adaptive capacity might evolve over time. Direct stakeholder involvement was key to the work; in each case the stakeholder partner participated in the scoping of the priority impacts, in data collection and in a formal workshop to discuss the implications of the results. Summary of results: In each case study, economic costs were generated and expressed in annual terms for the three 30-year time

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Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 6 (2009) 322006

IOP Publishing doi:10.1088/1755-1307/6/2/322006

periods represented in each of the four climate scenarios for a) climate change plus socio-economic change, and b) climate change costs attributable to climate change alone, discounted using exponentially declining rates (Weitzman, 2001), and undiscounted. Stakeholder involvement ensured that the quantitative analysis undertaken was viewed in the context of location-specific (current) concerns. It enabled the variety of adaptation options to be identified and allowed an initial assessment of the extent of adaptation cost and its distribution of burden to be undertaken e.g. between private and public sector economic agents. An initial assessment was made of how adaptive capacity may be determined in the sector under alternative SES in the medium and long term (>20 years) for which it is less appropriate to specify adaptation options. Conclusions: The study allows us to explore the extent to which climate and socio-economic scenarios can be tailored to the local scale, the scale at which the majority of adaptation decisions are likely to be made. Stakeholder involvement added realism to the exercise and served to highlight the level of detail and certainty required from the data in order to be useful to adaptation decision-making. Specifically, it demonstrated that adaptation planning on the basis of climate change impact costs was more limited in the contexts where there was less certainty in the specification of climatic and socio-economic projections, and for longer time horizons. References Hulme, M. et al, (2002) Climate Change Scenarios for the United Kingdom: The UKCIP02 Scientific Report, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. 120PP UKCIP (2001) Socio-economic scenarios for climate change impact assessment: a guide to their use in the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Oxford: UKCIP. Weitzman, M. (2001) Gamma Discounting. American Economic Review. 91:1 March. 261-271.

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