Identification of Climate Change Impacts and Tradeoffs Established Under Shared Socioeconomic Pathways of IPCC AR6 using A Moderate Resolution GCM viz. MRI-ESM2-0 of CMIP6 over Pakistan

Abstract

Pakistan will be 100 years by the end of mid-21st century. Within its continued lifespan, it has borne witness to various climate change hazards exclusively conveyed under the umbrella of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports (ARs). Recently published IPCC’s AR6 establishes its distinctiveness by addressing co-benefits, risks, interactions, trade-offs and economic development factors associated with magnitude of climate change factors, both regionally and globally. With heavy exposure to climate change indications in recent times, implications of such factors to shared socioeconomic narratives needed attention, especially over Pakistan region. To address this, a moderate resolution General Circulation Model (GCM) viz. MRI-ESM2-0 of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) was engaged to detect magnitude of potential risks associated with five Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) in the future. Change in mean state of global climate extracted over local realm was integrated with Gantt-like charts to depict severity and abruptness of the studied pathways to potential threats and balances over provinces and regions of Pakistan. Results revealed realms of risk that potentially placed the provinces and the regions at par with globally provoked hazards, yet simultaneously co-befitted them with tradeoff of boosts in economic development based on fossil fuel investments. Nevertheless predictions of such nature are constrained with global and local policy interventions, and hence are conveyed as spectrum of potential implications of the global climate change on national realms in the future.

On the emergence of a predicted climate change signal: When and where it could appear over Pakistan

“…Attributed to the stated enriched features in the MRI-ESM2.0 over its former versions-MRI-CGCM3/MRI-ESM1-the model was anticipated to reveal greater performance in research intended under the CMIP6. A recent utilization and validation of the MRI-ESM2.0 over Pakistan may be seen in Burhan et al (2022).…”

“…Nevertheless, based on potential uncertainties that could arise from single model use, they advised to exercise caution in attempting to use such outputs and conditioned the use of such with pre-assessment of the engaged model output for use in impacts assessment studies. We therefore engaged that particular model out of the CMIP6 data repository whose output had been already evaluated over our region of interest (Burhan et al, 2022). In this regard, it is therefore advised to treat the results as projections only, especially when they are derived from single climate model data outputs.…”