Abstracts

The Use of SRES Scenarios in Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Assessments

Monirul Q. Mirza
Environment Canada
monirul.mirza@utoronto.ca

Scenarios of climate change have been used by the vulnerability, impact and adaptation (VIA) community for many years in a number of roles. In 2000, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released "Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES)" (IPCC, 2000) which explored pathways of future greenhouse gas emissions, derived from self-consistent sets of assumptions about energy use, population growth, economic development, and other factors. However, the scenarios were developed using the average values of these socio-economic factors large four regions. Therefore when the socio-economic values are downscaled at a country level or catchment level, either over- or under-estimated values are produced. Downscaling the land-use change components of the SRES scenarios appear to be more problematic because they are calculated by the integrated assessment models used in the SRES process and the projections diverge widely even under the same storyline. In these contexts, this paper has two specific objectives. First, it summarizes the relationships between the information required for conducting climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability assessments and the information available in the SRES scenarios. Second, it identifies the limitations of uses of SRES in VIA assessments.

2005-04-05