The Second IMPRESSIONS General Assembly took place from 20 until 22 January 2015 in the meeting rooms of the beautiful Casa Convalescència, at the UAB Campus, Barcelona. Climate change impact, adaptation and mitigation experts from 30 institutions got together to discuss the possible implications of high-end climate change (i.e. beyond +2oC).
Participants at the 2nd IMPRESSIONS General Assembly, Barcelona, Spain.
After the IMPRESSIONS official kick-off meeting held in January last year, the project has progressed many conceptual and theoretical aspects of its work programme related to the development of multi-scale climate and socio-economic scenarios of the future, their application to climate change impact models, how this can inform the assessment of different adaptation and mitigation pathways for society, and thereby support decision-making under such highly uncertain futures.
Following progress reports from each of the project’s work packages and case studies, intensive discussion on specific topics took place. These included:
- the process for stakeholder engagement at the 1st set of workshops in each case study which will focus on the development of socio-economic scenarios up to 2100;
- the process for stakeholder engagement between the 3 sets of stakeholder workshops in each case study;
- detailed planning for the EU external (central Asia) case study workshop which takes place next month in Almaty, Kazakhstan;
- development of protocols for application of impact models to different scenario futures whilst understanding model sensitivity, robustness and uncertainty;
- evaluation of the appropriateness of existing approaches for analysing costs and benefits under high-end scenarios;
- development of the methodology for stress-testing existing policies in case studies to high-end climate change;
- further development of the different components of the methodology for developing adaptation and mitigation pathways, such as actions, strategies, transformation, transformability, capacities and capitals, resilience, vulnerability and visions; and
- review of the wildcards that will be used to stress-test the adaptation and mitigation pathways in the 3rd set of stakeholder workshops in each case study.
Project Coordinator Dr. Paula Harrison, University of Oxford and meeting organizer Dr. J. David Tábara, giving an opening talk at the IMPRESSIONS 2nd General Assembly meeting
During the meeting the work of the two IMPRESSIONS’ sister projects HELIX and RISES-AM- was also presented. More about the projects can be found here: http://highendclimateresearch.eu/