Climate Change and the European Water Dimension
Synthesis Report published by the Institute for Environment and Sustainability (IES)
The scientific synthesis report on climate change and knowledge gaps in the water sector analyses the real and potential impacts of climate change on European aquatic ecosystems such as lakes, coastal systems and coastal lagoons. It describes the impact of climate change on European floods and droughts and the corresponding challenges to water use in agriculture. It also addresses how climate change may impact the implementation of the Water Framework Directive and the ecological status of Europe's water bodies.
The report identifies several challenges
In the area of adaptation, there is a need to:
- Identify and detect signals of climate change in inland and coastal waters.
- Develop indicators sensitive to climate variability and climate change of the impacts on inland and coastal waters.
- Provide relevant input to EU water policy makers on the impacts to the water sector (agriculture, urban centres, industrial and energy sectors, civil protection, spatial planning) under climate change scenarios.
- Perform economic analyses of the costs of adapting to climate change in the water sector and analysis of the externalities of environmental systems under climate change impacts.
- Most importantly, to develop and apply regional climate change models at the sub-regional and river basin scale to Asses potential response of land and water systems, and mitigation strategies with associated costs.
Specifically in the water sector, to
- Quantify at the European and river basin scale the impacts of climate change on water quality of surface water and GW, and water classification for river basin management by coupling river basin – coastal zone models in a climate changed world.
- Quantify at the European and river basin scale the impacts of climate change on water quantity, its spatial-temporal distribution including extreme events such as floods and droughts, and availability of surface and GW under different scenarios and uses, and the associated costs of adaptation.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of different protection measures in trans-national river basins with hydrological models as a response to possible increase in extreme events.
- Evaluate the impacts of climate change on the re-mobilization, edistribution and emission of contaminants (chemical and microbiological) as a result of warming and extreme events.
- Establish long term monitoring at the pan-European scale of marine and coastal systems using earth observing satellites and other tools of those parameters sensitive or indicative of climate change (SST, sea level rise, biomass, primary productivity, carbon cycles, wind fields, trophic state).