Characterising Climate Risks Breakout Workshop Presentation

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Characterising Climate Risks Breakout Workshop
Presentation

• Roger N. Jones
• CSIRO Atmospheric Research

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Characterising climate risks

• The largest risks come from climate variability
  and extremes rather being a direct consequence of
  mean climate change
• Scenario builders need to use a variety of
  methods to address this and not be limited by
  global climate models

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• I dont just want to see variability,
• I want to see CHANGE
• The Right Reverend Barry Smit
• First Church of the Evangelical Adaptor

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Vulnerability, Impacts and Adaptation
V I - A Vulnerability Impacts - Adaptation
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Current climate
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Future climate - no adaptation
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Future climate with adaptation
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Linking key climatic variables to impacts
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Critical thresholdsMacquarie River Catchment

• Irrigation
• 5 consecutive years below 50 allocation of water
  right
• Wetlands
• 10 consecutive years below bird breeding events

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Threshold exceedance as a function of change in
flow (irrigation)
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Threshold exceedance as a function of change in
flow (bird breeding)
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Characterising risk

• Climate change risk can be characterised
  according to a function of vulnerability related
  to
• probability criticality
• Where criticality is a known threshold, measured
  by how far an impact is shifted out of the coping
  range.
• This can quantify V I - A for individual
  impacts.

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Risk response surfaceChange in mean irrigation
allocations in 2030
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Risk response surface Change in Macquarie Marsh
inflows in 2030
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Probability distribution function for irrigation
supply, dam supply and wetlands 2030
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Summary

• There are a large number of tools available for
  characterising climate risk that are
  under-utilised.
• Uncertainty will not go away, so one strategy is
  to fully embrace uncertainty and develop
  probabilities.
• Thresholds are important tools for linking
  performance criteria for specific activities to
  climate. They often involve one or more aspects
  of climate variability but can be very robust.
• Climate change for individual impacts often
  requires combinations of single event (mean
  change) and frequency-based uncertainties
  (variability) to be addressed in characterising
  risk