Socio-economic Impacts—Offshore Activities/Energy

Abstract

The entire North Sea region is experiencing a changing climate and all available projections suggest the region will exhibit a wide range of climate change impacts over the coming decades. Among the robust results of this assessment are that the entire region is warming, and that the warming is almost certain to continue throughout this century; also that sea level is rising and will continue to rise at a rate close to the global average. Substantial natural variability in the North Sea region (from annual to multi-decadal time scales) makes it challenging to isolate regional climate change signals and impacts for some parameters. This is the case both for the observational period and for regional climate change projections and impact studies. Projecting regional climate change and impacts for the North Sea region is currently limited by the small number of regional coupled model runs available and the lack of consistent downscaling approaches, both for marine and terrestrial impacts. The wide spread in results from multi-model ensembles indicates the present uncertainty in the amplitude and spatial pattern of the projected changes in sea level, temperature, salinity and primary production. For moderate climate change, anthropogenic drivers such as changes in land use, agricultural practice, river flow management or pollutant emissions are often more important for impacts on ecosystems than climate change. The NOSCCA key findings that follow are provided as short statements. Quantifying the effects, changes or impacts has largely been avoided as this would require additional annotations or geographical specification. The aim here is to provide a concise summary of the major outcome of NOSCCA.