Tag: climate adaptation

A Climate Atlas is discovered..

This post is in response to a thread posted on blue sky* by Jeremy Bassis and a discussion between Felicity mcCormack and Gavin Schmidt. All these people are well-respected climate scientists and the original thread was posted as a result of a Nature piece about operationalising climate models (and sea level rise), like we forecast the weather. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while too, as sea level rise is an undeniable existential threat to my home country…

Anyway, I replied with a link to the Danish Climate Atlas – which to my mind is very much a model for how climate information should be done. I can’t give a full overview of the Climate Atlas, largely because it’s not my story to tell, but as Jeremy asked me to talk more in depth about it, and given the 300 character limit, I thought I’d formulate a few thoughts here first before sharing…

The climate atlas is not a book but a web frontpage that allows anyone with an internet connection to get high quality climate information at a local scale in Denmark. The map interface makes it easy and intuitive to use, and for detail a whole bunch of reports and datasets in different formats can be downloaded (everything from ASCII to GIS to netcdf). You can explore it here. All the data is given on a kommune (local authority) level except for sea level rise data which is divided up by coastal stretches.

Example of a Climate atlas figure – this is the overview figure, each local authority area is clickable for local information

For audiences that just want a quick message there are these easy to interpret icons with a key message below, like this one about higher water levels.

I was involved in the early stages and to my mind there are 4 crucial elements that have made it very successful:

  1. Legal Requirement: Every local authority (a kommune, don’t think hippies, think regional councils) in Denmark has a legal obligation to make climate adaptation plans and to keep them updated. This element is important as it created awareness of the problem and effects of climate change and the necessity of investigating adaptation options. The initial plans were rather patchy and not very consistent with each other. Many regions had employed a consultant who was also maybe not an expert. Several kommune ended up with data based on CMIP resolution data! Hardly appropriate for a small local region in Denmark (which is barely resolved in most global climate models).
  2. Data Foundation: At the same time we have been dynamically downscaling these simulations for decades, to provide really high quality locally bias corrected data (using also DMI’s long climatological time series to understand if and where biases exist). Colleagues at DMI identified a need to provide this in an easy to use format to everyone in the country. We had long ago discovered that working with motivated kommune employees led to a really good outcome: readable climate variables that are meaningful to an individual city, data formats that can be used by non-scienists (who definitely can’t deal with netCDFs).
  3. Funding: Doing a data project properly requires money. The Climate Atlas is, compared to the cost of not doing anything, extremely cheap, nonetheless, it still costs something. Ear marked funding from the danish state to build up the Climate Atlas from the ground, to develop it as new needs are identified and to improve both communication and presentation has been crucial. Along the way several different needs have arisen (droughts, deep uncertainty in sea level rise), a new version will hopefully be coming soon.
  4. Intense engagement: Probably the most crucial aspect to getting the climate atlas off the ground and into use has been communication over and over and over again. Not just initially with kommune to find out what they need (building on many years of background experience first), but also reaching out to special interest groups raning from local farmers in mid-west Jylland to sewage engineers, high school teachers and property developers. This continues, but has undeniably been helped by Denmark’s open trusting society and generous tradition of cultural meetings, continuing education and festivals.

The climate atlas in Denmark is the example I know best, we should be rightly proud of the team that constructed, maintain and continue to develop it. Other countries certainly have similar products in the Nordic and Blatic countries, and likely elsewhere, a network meets annually within the region to discuss developments etc. After a coincidental meeting, DMI was also invited to help develop one for Ghana, which is ongoing, and of course, will have completely different needs and requirements, However, the decision early one to base the back end of the Climate Atlas on open tools: python, cdo, github and CORDEX simulations, makes a lot of the learnings transferable.

If you want to know more, contact my colleagues at the Klima Atlas! I’m happy to put you in touch..

*As an aside, it’s interesting how many of the climate science and policy community have moved over to Blue Sky. It was rather quiet for a while but activity seems to have picked up. I’m not abandoning mastodon, which I actually prefer, but I’m happy to see an alternative to what has become known as Birdchan. I’d urge you to try it if you’re interested in a social media presence in a slightly more appealing environment. There are a number of handy tools, including fedica, that allow you to crosspost to multiple channels at the same time (including X, mastodon, bsky, TikTok and threads) and I’m also using the OpenVibe app, which has a common timeline from multiple platforms.

Climate justice and communication..

In yesterday’s post I rather skated over the justice and equity point that although “We” can adapt to climate change impacts, it’s going to be expensive and perhaps difficult in terms of planning.

Climate adaptation will also most likely (going by previous history), be unevenly spread and probably not focussed on those feeling the biggest impacts, but those most able to pay for it.

This is something I’ve been pondering for a while, and I’m not really sure how to grasp it, but perhaps more and better work with the social scientists is necessary?

I was struck yesterday by this related snippet from the IPCC AR6 WGII report, posted by David Ho (and I gather courtesy Eric Rostrom), pointing out that heatwave impacts will be unevenly distributed between high and low income people.

At the same time, I also read an interesting piece in the Danish newspaper this weekend suggesting that heatwave exposure is a new marker of class, even in Europe. With the working class toiling in fields, roads, kitchens and on building sites, while the higher educated white collar professionals both able to take advantage of air conditioning and to afford time off in cooler places. This is not a new argument. But it is yet another argument for unions and robust government regulation to try to limit heatwave morbidity and mortality where this is possible. Trades unions may not be able to solve all problems, but they can definitely help when it comes to working conditions!

On a similar note, but outside Europe, the Economist has an unexpectedly excellent piece on how meteorology can help to mitigate weather and climate driven disasters . The whole piece is worth a read as it very much aligns with developments I can see at DMI. They point out for example the great possibilities offered by AI methods in weather forecasting, and how they can be applied to climate models (something I hope to start working on this year), as well as the dangers that AI could be used to undermine the robust national infrastructure that machine learning models are in fact built on.

However, the most important point is that so often, the main challenge is getting extreme weather warnings and other important information out to people affected.

“24 hours’ notice of a destructive weather event could cut damage by 30%, and that a $800m investment in early-warning systems for developing countries could prevent annual losses of $3bn-16bn.”

The world’s poor need to know about weather disasters ahead of time from TheEconomist https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/07/27/the-worlds-poor-need-to-know-about-weather-disasters-ahead-of-time

If 3 out of 4 of the world’s population owns a mobile phone, then this is an obvious place to start to leverage. (We are already working on this, DMI have new projects with Ghana and Tanzania to develop a climate atlas for this kind of risk mitigation.) So with the WMO focusing on better warnings and communication channels by 2027, perhaps some of the worst impacts of climate change supercharged weather events like heatwaves and floods can be mitigated.

The piece concludes:

No breakthroughs are required to put this right, just some modest investment, detailed planning, focused discussion and enough political determination to overcome the inevitable institutional barriers. It is not an effort in the Promethean tradition of MANIAC’s [sic – an early pioneering weather supercomputer] begetters; it will neither set the world on fire nor model the ways in which it is already smouldering. But it should save thousands of lives and millions of livelihoods.

And this is probably generally true of the way we should think about climate change adaptation in the near and short term: how to leverage the best possible information to help make decisions and nudge behaviour to remove people from harm.

And now back to my last day of holiday…

Beaches of northern Sjælland, Denmark