Track 3a. Climate Change: predicting impacts

Track Chairs:

Júlia Seixas. Center for Environmental and Sustainability Research, Dep. of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, School of Science and Technology, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal.

Luís Miguel Nunes. Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability, School of Science and Technology, Universidade do Algarve. Faro, Portugal.

Contact: mjs@fct.unl.pt; lnunes@ualg.pt

Goals and objectives of the track

Sustainable development, in particular sustainable production and consumption, and climate protection, is increasingly constrained by natural resources. The current world population of 7.3 billion is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, and 9.7 billion in 2050, according to UN projections. The increase of the number of people and their standards of quality of life will result in an increased demand for water, food, and energy, and hence a higher pressure over the natural resources necessary to deliver goods and services. Although the use of natural resources is becoming more efficient due to (non-) and technological factors, there is the need to identify and predict the impacts of future climate changes in energy systems, at different geographic scales, aiming to contribute to the design and implementation of new and innovative policies, practices, and governance schemes, towards sustainable development, namely on energy for all.

Changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans (IPCC, 2014). Projected changes of climate variables will exacerbate the impacts on the availability and quality of natural resources, such as water and biomass, with consequences for the services they provide. For example, changing patterns of spatial distribution of water resources have led to crop yields decline, or to flooding and crop failure. Water issues have generally been addressed by using more energy, allowing water redistribution over vast distances (e.g. diversions of water from one watershed to another) and (particularly in highly arid regions) extensive water production through seawater desalination. Also, changing patterns of average and extremes of temperature have increased, in some regions, energy services demand towards thermal comfort and health, that should be fulfilled through renewables, like hydropower and solar PV farms, to avoid the emission of greenhouse gas emissions. However, massive use of such renewables should be taken with caution due to its impacts on the water cycle and on land use change. The intrinsic relation between energy and other resources, known as nexus, tends to deepen and expand under climate change scenarios. Nexus refers to how resources should be co-managed to deliver sustained water-food-energy goods and services, while reducing resource-intensity and environmental pressures. The link between the nexus and climate change impacts, locally and teleconnections through global commodity flows, is currently a very challenging scientific issue towards sustainable resources management, as illustrated by the planetary boundaries (Steffen et al, 2015).

The main goal of this track is to discuss new approaches and concepts, methods and case study applications to predict the impacts of future climate changes on energy systems, including on natural resources for energy services, taking the nexus perspective, for different regions and scales, including the global level. Methods and tools to assess options and strategies to cope with those impacts are also objectives of this track. 

Contributions from the followings areas are sought-after: 

• New approaches to predict impacts of climate changes on energy systems, from resources supply to end-use energy services demand;
• Integrated methods and tools (e.g. integrated assessment modeling, integrated quantitative data and indigenous knowledge);
• Predicting impacts on energy systems across regions (e.g. bioenergy imports);
• Methods to deal with uncertainty in predicting impacts;
• Assessment of strategies and options to cope with impacts of future climate changes on the energy systems, taking the nexus perspective when appropriate;
• Scale effects of predictions of climate change impacts, considering local, regional, national and transnational levels, and global level;
• Communication of impacts of future climate changes on energy systems to stakeholders.

You may submit your abstract by visiting the Ex Ordo abstract submission system (you will be required to setup an account first): http://isdrs2016.exordo.com/