WP4 - IMPACTS

Responsable : Christophe Rabouille, LSCE

Objectifs et stratégie

We focus here on the impacts of climate change on the natural resources and the ecosystem services, the human activities they support and evolve with, and the resulting environmental changes. Regarding the future, an important issue is to characterize impacts in terms of vulnerability/benefit for resources and ecosystems services in order to propose sound adaptation strategies. The retrospective direction is also important regarding the detection and attribution of observed changes, and the necessary validation of models. An improvement in knowledge of processes in the natural environment including new process studies is needed in order to build forecast capacities for future impacts.

Such studies cover a very wide range of topics and require integrated approaches combining various data and models, with important issues regarding up/downscaling methods and uncertainty analyses, which will be addressed in tight collaboration with WP3 and TWP3. Based on the existing strengths of L-IPSL, we initially identified four sectors on which to focus our efforts: water resources (including ground water and hydrological extremes), biogeochemical fluxes and ecosystems along the land-ocean continuum (including terrestrial and marine productivity, water quality); energy resources and infrastructures; sources of regional and global air pollution.

A first WP4 meeting held on March 16th, 2012, helped to refine our scientific strategy. WP4 can rely on about 30 dedicated scientists from all L-IPSL laboratories, with different levels of experience regarding impacts studies, thus different kinds of actions depending on scientific expertise:

  • water resources, vegetation production: reinforce and integrate existing activities
  • cold-processes/Arctic, terrestrial water quality and related fluxes, land-sea interface, marine ecosystems, air pollution: move from process studies to impact studies
  •  energy : develop the working force to continue preliminary results

The L-IPSL budget cannot support all specific impact studies, and we rather aim at developing the potential of L-IPSL teams to attract their own funding, by promoting scientific structuration and methodological advances:

  •  Capacity building at IPSL on climate change impacts: share experience on inherent difficulties; develop/adapt ad-hoc modeling capabilities to be responsive to research projects solicitations; promote supporting data-mining, observational & experimental work.
  •  Cutting-edge methodological research: disciplinary advances regarding overlooked aspects of the global cycles (e.g. land/sea fluxes, transfers and transformation in hydro-systems, marine ecosystems, ground water); interdisciplinary integration, including solicitations to climate modelers (WP3); adaptation strategies, in tight collaboration with TWP3 (Uncertainties) and the L-IPSL innovation activities.