Discover the climate change impact on any place of the world through interactive platforms
It is widely know that climate change is going to wreak havoc over communities and regions through temperature and precipitation change as well as the increase in frequency over extreme events. Taken together, this will disrupt the sustainability of long-running economic and social systems, leading to refugee crisis and decreased quality of life.
Having that in mind, a key consideration for any spatial decision making that involves the medium-term future is: how much this can be affected by what we know in terms of the climate projections? Having access to summaries across the world is easy, but not so much when it comes to getting to know how your specific region is going to change.
On this Medium article, I'll review and list public tools which can help us to map those specifics. A key requisite is that the tool must be globally comprehensive, or relevant to the Brazilian / South American territory, as this is my direct area of interest.
Tools to be reviewed
During my research, I've found out the following tools which can be relevant for understanding the future climate.
- impactlab.org Climate Impact Mab (temperature)
- therevelator.org maps (temperature & precipitation)
- Climate Central sea level rise map (sea level)
- INPE numerical climate projections (temperature & precipitation)
- MCTI Adapta Brasil (risk indexes)
One thing that I've noticed is that there is a severe lack of platforms which have global coverage — most of them are US only, even though most of the scientific projections are based on models and data that are global in scale.
impactlab.org Climate Impact Map
Link: http://www.impactlab.org/map/
This is the interactive tool for temperature projections which have a lot of options in regards to different scenarios while also having global coverage, and as such it is usually my first choice when looking into a specific place.
Among the projection options, you can choose between the following scenarios:
- Moderate emissions (RCP 4.5) and High emissions (RCP 8.5)
- Median and bounded (CI 5% and 95%) projections
- Time scale — Next 20 years (2020–2039), Mid-Century (2040–2059) or End of Century (2080–2099)
Also, you have some options in regards to visualizing the temperature change. I find that knowing the number of days above 35 C is a excellent option, as it is very associated with agricultural viability and human quality of life.
- Average temperature (yearly, summer and winter)
- Number of days above 35 C yearly
- Number of days below 0 C yearly
The main issue with this tool is the relative lack of granularity. The tooltip only gives you the numerical values for countries, so you have to zoom in and look into the color scale in order to get better insights.
therevelator.org maps
- Precipitation link: https://therevelator.org/interactive-map-precipitation-2050/
- Temperature link: https://therevelator.org/interactive-map-climate-2050/
Those visualizations made by Revelator has a nice feature that is municipality granularity all over the world. This is great for having more specific insights, although it must be taken with a grain of salt as there are no options for the scenarios, while the numerical values are aggregated yearly. All values assume a RCP 8.5 scenarios (median projection) by 2050, and are anomalies compared to the 1970–2000 means.
One possible workflow is to first identify the patterns by using the Climate Impact Lab, and then using the Revelator values for fine-tuning the estimates.
Climate Central sea level rise map (sea level)
Link: https://choices.climatecentral.org/
That's a tool for seeing what is going to be the areas that will be underwater under a variety of conditions and scenarios. Useful if you are concerned about the coastlines.
INPE numerical climate projection
Link: http://pnud.cptec.inpe.br/
This is a specialist tool which is used mainly by Brazilian researchers, and it has a lot of details in terms of projections, scenarios, indices and models. All the metrics are derived from temperature and precipitation, and it can be a useful tool if you want to deep diver into the regional climate change.
MCTI Adapta Brasil
Link: https://sistema.adaptabrasil.mcti.gov.br/
This is the most promising tool for Brazilian forecasts, and it is relatively new, as it was created on Oct 2020. The goal of it is to integrate all the existing public datasets, models and platforms that are related to climate change into a cohesive and accessible platform that allows for decision making.
One interesting feature is the use of holistic indexes which combine several demographic, geophysical and atmosphere projections.
Currently, it has coverage only to the arid region of Northeast Brazil, however there are several signals that increased coverage is being worked into.
Conclusions
That's the state of the art if you want interactive and accessible ways to getting to know about the climate change impacts locally. We have interesting platforms, but they still lag far behind the scientific state of the art, especially when concerning a global-wide coverage.
This can be a huge opportunity for builders which seek to maximize world impact. We already have a lot of datasets and models that can be used at will, but the interactivity lags far behind. Most of the accessible knowledge for the public at large is either limited (restricted to the tools that we've discussed), or aggregated in reports in a way that simply doesn't feel local enough.
I've worked with climate scientists, and I do know that there is a huge richness of detail on what we can know with granularity. We can have for example best guesses for the frequency of extreme events, however we do not have a interactive tool for that, only dense reports.
Creating tools that shows how much your neighborhood and city is going to be impacted has a huge potential for making people to take ownership about what climate change means, which is badly required right now.
