2 posts tagged with "Climate Change Impacts"

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) states that climate change and ocean acidification are altering the oceans at a rate that is unprecedented compared with the recent past, leading to multifaceted impacts on marine ecosystems, associated goods and services, and human societies. AR5 underlined key uncertainties that remain regarding how synergistic changes in the ocean are likely to affect human systems, and how humans are likely to respond to these events. As climate change research has accelerated rapidly following AR5, an updated synthesis of available knowledge is necessary to identify emerging evidence, and to thereby better inform policy discussions. This paper reviews the literature to capture corroborating, conflicting, and novel findings published following the cut-off date for contribution to AR5. Specifically, we highlight key scientific developments on the impacts of climate-induced changes in the ocean on key socioeconomic sectors, including fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism. New evidence continues to support a climate-induced redistribution of benefits and losses at multiple scales and across coastal and marine socio-ecological systems, partly resulting from species and ecosystem range shifts and changes in primary productivity. New efforts have been made to characterize and value ecosystem services in the context of climate change, with specific relevance to ecosystem-based adaptation. Recent studies have also explored synergistic interactions between climatic drivers, and have found strong variability between impacts on species at different life stages. Although climate change may improve conditions for some types of freshwater aquaculture, potentially providing alternative opportunities to adapt to impacts on wild capture fisheries, ocean acidification poses a risk to shellfish fisheries and aquaculture. The risk of increased prevalence of disease under warmer temperatures is uncertain, and may detrimentally affect human health. Climate change may also induce changes in tourism flows, leading to substantial geospatial shifts in economic costs and benefits associated with tourism revenue and coastal infrastructure protection and repairs. While promising, ecosystem-based coastal adaptation approaches are still emerging, and require an improved understanding of key ecosystem services, and values for coastal communities in order to assess risk, aid coastal development planning, and build decision support systems.

Projections of the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems are a key prerequisite for the planning of adaptation strategies, yet they are inevitably associated with uncertainty. Identifying, quantifying, and communicating this uncertainty is key to both evaluating the risk associated with a projection and building confidence in its robustness. We review how uncertainties in such projections are handled in marine science. We employ an approach developed in climate modelling by breaking uncertainty down into (i) structural (model) uncertainty, (ii) initialization and internal variability uncertainty, (iii) parametric uncertainty, and (iv) scenario uncertainty. For each uncertainty type, we then examine the current state-of-the-art in assessing and quantifying its relative importance. We consider whether the marine scientific community has addressed these types of uncertainty sufficiently and highlight the opportunities and challenges associated with doing a better job. We find that even within a relatively small field such as marine science, there are substantial differences between subdisciplines in the degree of attention given to each type of uncertainty. We find that initialization uncertainty is rarely treated explicitly and reducing this type of uncertainty may deliver gains on the seasonal-to-decadal time-scale. We conclude that all parts of marine science could benefit from a greater exchange of ideas, particularly concerning such a universal problem such as the treatment of uncertainty. Finally, marine science should strive to reach the point where scenario uncertainty is the dominant uncertainty in our projections.