Multi-pronged Approach to Identifying Hotspots

The effect of climate change is evident on different aspects of humanity, including agriculture, health, and energy. But what happens if negative effects of climate change on multiple sectors overlap? These negative effects can be amplified, and developing countries in particular will find it difficult to adapt and respond easily to the changes, says Adrian Tompkins, research scientist at ICTP's Earth System Physics section.

Tompkins is one of the authors on a recently published paper, Multisectoral climate impact hotspots in a warming world, that appears in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. The paper considers the impact of climate change on multiple sectors (using multimodel ensembles) and tries to identify "hotspots" where several sectors show negative impacts.

"At the moment, climate impacts are mostly assessed on a single impact basis in isolation," says Tompkins. "[Our] preliminary study is just a first step in a learning process of how to integrate the science of multiple sectoral impacts together with that of climate and economy," he adds.

"As the study involved multiple impacts and multiple models in each sector, there were a large number of contributing institutes from across the globe," says Tompkins. "ICTP contributed to the health sector impacts, which focused on the disease malaria," he says. Tompkins has been working with VECTRI, a mathematic dynamical model for malaria transmission that accounts for the impact of climate variability and population, and this was one of the models used in the study.

The study has identified regions of multisectoral climate impact hotspots, many of which occur in the lower latitudes where vulnerability is higher and capacity to adapt is limited. But the study also highlighted a high level of uncertainty between the various impact models. "This first study should be viewed as a 'pilot' experiment," Tompkins points out. He explains that the impact modelling is still a science in its infancy for many sectors, and the next step would be to try and integrate the sectors more closely.