Consequences of climatic change for the human environment

Abstract

Provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the science in estimating potential effects of climate change on the human environment. The paper provides an overview of the state of effects research and outlines the analyses required in order to make adaptive policy. It compares approaches that have been taken for measuring the human consequences of climate change, and outlines the results of climate change impact studies that have been performed both on individual sectors and entire regions. The paper also discusses both the results of studies of historical environmental changes that serve as analogs for potential future climate change and the major sources of uncertainty. The paper concludes with a summary of effects, knowns and unknowns, and directions for future research. In general, future effects research needs to be targeted on regions rather than individual resources; it must take the timing of resource effects and technological change explicitly into account; and it must directly address uncertainty using new and more efficient computational techniques, as opposed to brute-force Monte Carlo estimation. -Authors