Climate change impacts and water in Western Balkan

Blaz KurnikEEA

+colleagues from ETC

Outline

• Introduction

•Climate impacts and water extremes (from past to future)

• Assessing tools for climate prediction and impact modelling (simplicity vs. complexity)

• Preliminary results

• Conclusions

Report about climate impacts and vulnerability in Europe

Water related natural hazards (e.g. droughts and water scarcity)

Water related natural hazards (e.g. floods)

Simple indices vs. water balance model

The SPI is an index based on the probability of recording a given amount of precipitation, and the probabilities are standardized so that an index of zero indicates the median precipitation amount

McKee et al. 1993

Easy to compute (historical and operational precipitation data)

Drought is calculated using only precipitations

A physically based distributed rainfall-runoff model programmed in a dynamic GIS-language

Calculation of the soil moisture – important drought indicator

Complex model which needs a lot of validation and calibration for different regions

Impact models (components of water cycle modelling)

Inter- linkages and feedback

effects

Trends in European precipitation

Variability of rainfalls in last 100 yearsPrecipitation trends

Trends in droughts

Europe

South Eastern Europe

droughts

droughts

Climate projections and impact models

Cli

mat

e m

od

el

Imp

act

mo

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Trends in droughtsEurope

SE Europe

Average drought conditions in the future climate

Europe

SE Europe

95th

75th

50th – mean25th

5th

Scenarios:

Scenario 1: The good society in Balkan (low climate change impacts in the region, sustainable economic development), state in 2060

Scenario 2: yes, we can! Technogarden in Balkans (high climate change impacts in the region, sustainable economic development )- state in 2060

Scenario 3: Run to the hills (low climate change impacts in the region, un-sustainable economic development )- state in 2060

Scenario 4: downward spiral (high climate change impacts in the region, un-sustainable economic development ) - state in 2060

Changes in water extremes - droughts

Changes in surface run-off

Changes in surface run-off

Intermediate conclusions and way forward

• Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are important tool to assess future climates at the regional level;

• socio - economic scenarios are very important factor in predicting climate associated risks;

• strong agreement among scenarios and RCMs for drought occurrence in southern Europe;

• weaker agreement among scenarios and models concerning surface run-off;

Intermediate conclusions and way forward

• Presented results are based on on-going work and need to be carefully studied;

• clear definition of the criteria on which land cover scenario are based;

• need for using larger ensemble of the regional climate models (based on the local knowledge) – regional cooperation;