Future adaptive capacity
This component explores
the premise that current institutional adaptations land degradation and irregular
climate changes, framed by the level of external interventions, can provide important
analogies for future adaptability and criticality in relation to ecosystem changes
associated with modelled 21st century climate changes (IPCC 2001).
To achieve this component of the project, we will conduct three tasks:
| 1.
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Use
regionalised modelled outputs of climate changes for the 21st century
for southern African to identify communities in areas predicted to experience
major climate-induced disruptions to agriculture and ecosystems.
The University of Cape Town
co-investigator will draw on and extend current work for the AIACC
southern Africa scenarios project. The climate change projections will be derived
from multiple GCM simulations as well as empirically downscaled regional scenarios
based on the GCM data. Three current-generation GCMs (HadCM3, CSIRO-Mk2, ECHAM4/OPYC)
will be considered in order to obtain a plausible spread of future events. Baseline
climatologies or GCM validation at a high-resolution data set of daily observations
(spanning 50 years, over 7000 stations for South Africa alone) and from the University
of East Anglia - Climatic Research
Unit (CRU) (gridded climatologies). The GCM data will be used to evaluate
the smoothed regional climate change response, and in conjunction with empirical
downscaling to develop regional scale projections. The baseline climatology and
the downscaled projections will be used to develop measures of regional change
in drought, wet and dry sell duration, rainfall intensity and extremes, recurrence
intervals, changes in diurnal temperature range, and temperature maximum and minimum.
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| 2.
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To
model the ecosystem changes that will accompany these climate changes because
livelihoods are critically dependent on this natural resource.
The University of Sheffield
Animal and Plant Sciences co-investigators, in the context of the new NERC Carbon
Centre of Excellence at Sheffield (Centre for Terrestrial Carbon Dynamics, CTCD),
will model vegetation structure and dynamics using the Sheffield Dynamic Global
Vegetation Model (SDVM). The model uses soil texture and point climate data as
inputs and simulates vegetation processes (e.g. net primary production (NPP),
net ecosystem exchange, transpiration, leaf area index) and vegetation structure
and dynamics (functional type components, age classes, woody biomass and plant
density). NPP is the available plant material for harvest and functional types
indicate fractions of grasses, shrubs and trees. Outputs are annual to decadal
models of vegetation structure in the 21st Century. Visualised output
for future scenarios will be used in community-based adaptation assessments. These
outputs will help inform assessments of criticality.
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| 3. |
To
investigate current levels of vulnerability to climate changes and the capacity
to adapt to these modelled future changes in the locations identified in 1 and
2.
Conducted by the Sheffield
Geography and UEA co-investigators, field based investigations will examine:
- current institutional frameworks
in selected areas and how they may facilitate or constrain adaptive capacity,
particularly the adaptation of fundamental changes in utilisation of the NR base;
- elements of criticality
associated with physical thresholds linked to climatic parameters and predicted
ecosystem changes, above which historical experience and practice is not a guide
to future adaptation;
- the transferability of
adaptive strategies to new contexts, and what factors might be needed to facilitate
such transfers
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Copyright
© 2004-2012 ADAPTIVE, School of Geography and the Environment,
University of Oxford. Original website design and information provided by Dr H. Osbahr
 
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