Cross-sectoral and trans-national interactions in national-scale climate change impacts assessment—the case of the Czech Republic

Abstract

Assessing the combined impacts of future climate and socioeconomic change at the country level is vital for supporting national adaptation policies. Here, we use a novel modelling approach to study the systemic impacts of climate and socioeconomic changes on the Czech Republic, taking account of cross-sectoral interactions between agriculture, water, forestry, land-use and biodiversity, and, for the first time, trans-national interactions. We evaluate the national-level baseline results, scenario-neutral model sensitivities, and climate and socioeconomic scenario impacts using a European-scale integrated modelling tool. Consistently across most climate and socioeconomic scenarios, the Czech Republic is projected to have increasing importance as a crop-growing region in Europe, due to an increased competitive advantage within the continent. Arable land in the Czech Republic expands, at the expense of livestock farming and forestry, with associated impacts of increased water scarcity and reduced biodiversity for the country. Accounting for trans-national interactions in national-scale assessments provides more realistic assessments of impacts and helps to identify the changing role of the country within its regional and continental domain. Such improved understanding can support policy-makers in developing national adaptation actions that reduce adverse impacts and realise opportunities.

Implementing land-based mitigation to achieve the Paris Agreement in Europe requires food system transformation

“…2.1. The IAP The impacts and risks from high-end scenarios: strategies for innovative solutions (IMPRESSIONS) IAP is an interactive web-based platform to assess climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation [28,[33][34][35][36]. The platform integrates a series of interlinked meta-models representing urban development [37,38], water resources [39], flooding [40], forests and agriculture [41], and biodiversity [42] (supplementary figure SF1 is available online at stacks.…”

“…Three available combinations of global and regional climate models were used (NorESM1-M-RCA4, EC-EARTH-RCA4 and MPI-ESM-LR-REMO). In this study, the IAP version 2 was used [33]. All calculations were performed in R version 3.5.1 [44] using the packages raster [45], rgeos [46], rgdal [47], and Gmisc [48].…”

“…This is the first study to look at rigorous, regional strategies that are consistent with global achievement of the Paris Agreement, without shifting responsibilities to other regions. The study applies a regional integrated assessment platform (IAP) for Europe [33] to explore stylised future scenarios of the food system that cover both food supply (i.e. technological change) and food demand (i.e.…”

Nexus of Climate Change and Policing

“…Finally, fostering inter-and intra-service collaboration among law enforcement organizations is a must for resolving the multiple difficulties associated with the climate-policing nexus. Climate change crosses regional and sectoral lines [36], and its consequences frequently necessitate coordinated responses from several stakeholders. When dealing with climaterelated issues, law enforcement cannot act in isolation [17].…”

Estimating Drought-Induced Crop Yield Losses at the Cadastral Area Level in the Czech Republic

“…Despite the fact that agriculture in Central Europe represents a seemingly small part of the economy [10], it is nevertheless the dominant land use, with wheat, barley, winter rapeseed, sugar beets and potatoes being the dominant crops [11]. Since 2000, 6 major droughts within Central Europe have been reported, including the spring drought in 2000, the well-known 2003 drought, 2 more regionally constrained events during 2006-2007 and 2011-2012 [12] and the 2015-2019 drought episode, which can be classified as a 500-year drought [13].…”