Integrated regional assessment and climate change impacts in river basins

Abstract

Integrated regional assessment of climate change is an interdisciplinary, iterative process that involves scientific, policy, and societal stakeholders. The goal of integrated regional assessment is to promote a better understanding of, and more informed decisions on, how locales and regions contribute to and are affected by climate change. The purpose of the paper is to explain what integrated regional assessment is and how it is being used by practitioners. It aims to promote this approach by offering a more comprehensive account of integrated regional assessment than has been presented before. The article uses the integrated assessment of climate change impacts in river basins to provide a concrete regional basis for discussion. Case studies of 3 integrated assessments of river basins are presented to demonstrate the value of this approach. It is argued that when integrated regional assessment works, it provides an ideal way of bringing together science, society, and policy to face the challenges of climate change.

Geographical Perspectives on Climate Change

“…Climate change is additionally a subject that can benefit from a systems-level understanding developed from multi-and interdisciplinary integrated approaches (Yarnal 1998;Steiner and Hatfield 2008;Schuepbach et al 2009). It is here that geography and geographers can play a particularly important role.…”

The concepts and development of a participatory regional integrated assessment tool

“…Arnell et al 2004;Parry et al 2004). As a result, few studies describe the results of regional (sub-national) scale assessments (e.g., Rosenberg 1993;Yarnal 1998;Yohe et al 1999;Fisher 2000;Strzepek et al 2001;Carmichael et al 2004;Holman et al 2005a, b). Of these, RegIS (Holman et al 2005a, b) was one of the few assessments to consider the effects of both socioeconomic and policy change.…”

“…It is fundamental to this definition that there are two main principles to integrated assessment: (1) integration over a range of relevant disciplines; and (2) the provision of new and appropriate information about how complex real-world systems might behave that enables or improves decision making (Harremoes and Turner 2001;Jones 2001;Yarnal 1998). Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions -DETR (2000, p 138) assert that the regional (sub-national) scale studies are most relevant to decision-making, a view supported by Dessai and Hulme (2004) and Turnpeny et al (2004).…”

A Regional, Multi-Sectoral And Integrated Assessment Of The Impacts Of Climate And Socio-Economic Change In The Uk

“…Although there are papers describing the theory of Integrated assessment (for example Jones, 2001;Harremoes and Turner, 2001;Warren, 2002), there are few studies which describe the results of such an assessment at the regional (sub-national) scale (e.g. Rosenberg 1993;Yarnal, 1998;Yohe et al, 1999Yohe et al, , 2002Fisher, 2000;Strzepek et al, 2001) as opposed to the supra-national and global scales (e.g. Dowlatabadi, 1995;Nordhaus and Yang, 1996;Alcamo et al, 1998;Parry et al, 1999;Tyson et al, 2001;Matsuoka et al, 2001;Toth, 2003).…”