RAMSES Urban climate projections and climate impact detection

Link

Download the Ramses handbook, go to table of contents, click ‘Worksheet no.2: Urban climate projections and climate impact detection’.

Description

RAMSES is a European research project, which delivered much-needed quantified evidence of the impacts of climate change and the costs and benefits of a wide range of adaptation measures, focusing on cities. RAMSES engaged with stakeholders to ensure its outcomes are policy relevant and ultimately enable the design and implementation of adaptation strategies in the EU and beyond.

The ‘Urban climate projections and climate impact detection’ worksheet developed within this project is a detailed, step-by-step description of steps to take intended to provide a methodology to carry out a first assessment and keep track of the climatic changes in a city and to understand how these changes will impact the urban and social fabric. It can be found a an addendum of the RAMSES handbook and training package. The descriptions are clear, sometime supported by examples and suggestions. As a first assessment, the method is extensive, thorough and therefore requires a significant investment in time. As a method, it leaves a significant amount of work to the interpretation of the user.

Use in decision framework

Climate threat

Input

The method calls for identification of data sources on climate change, identification of their expected impact, identification of service areas, including both direct and indirect impacts. This requires much interaction with third parties, expertise on climate change, expertise on the impact of weather and climate change on various services and the ability to coordinate and oversee these efforts. The time investment would be considered to be considerable.

Outline

The method defines the following steps:

Gather information on climate change from different stakeholders
Identify concrete sources for that information
Determine the expected climate change
Identify impacts and service areas
Identify relevant service areas
implicit step: summarize findings and draw conclusions

Output

Output of the method is an overview of how climate change directly or indirectly impacts various services, see table below.

From RAMSES handbook: example matrix listing direct (D) and indrect (I) impacts on various services

Experiences

Not available