Abstract
The Climate Report 2018 for South Tyrol was produced within an internal project of Eurac Research together with the support of other experts from universities, the Research Center of Laimburg and the Province of Bolzano. The main purpose of the report is to communicate the latest scientific evidence on potential consequences of climate change for South Tyrol and analyze options for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the expected impacts of climate change. The goal was achieved by means of a very interdisciplinary approach, since a team of more than 40 researchers of different Eurac institutes spent a year in collecting and analyzing data and exchanging knowledges encompassing a broad spectrum of fields. The final text was edited by the Eurac department of science communication which allowed to effectively disseminate the content to a wide range of public, e.g. decision makers, schools and interested citizens, and to provide to the authorities a scientific document which could be easily consulted to support the local planning.
The 120 pages of the report are structured in four main sections: evidences of climate change and assessment of main greenhouse gas sources for the Province, climate change impacts on natural system, impacts on society, and possible mitigation and adaptation strategies.
The climate change signal was assessed at local scale by exploiting the longest past weather observations and by extracting the downscaled future scenarios relative to different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) from a bias-corrected ensemble of climate model outputs of Euro-Cordex database. Daily temperature and precipitation series spanning the last 50 years and projected, together with model uncertainty, to 2100 were constructed for the historical weather sites in South Tyrol and used to propose specific climate indicators, such as number of tropical nights or length of growing season, and to evaluate their trends and variability.
Potential climate change impacts were discussed for each of the most meaningful natural components for South Tyrol, i.e. water and snow, biodiversity and natural hazards, such as avalanches and landslides, by exploiting current data, other existing studies and by analyzing the past and future projections of the specific climate indicators, e.g. the mean annual cycle of Adige river catchment runoff to assess possible variations in water availability.
By following the same approach, the climate change impacts on society are discussed by individually focusing on the most vulnerable sectors: water management and hydropower production, agriculture and forestry, infrastructures, mountain and urban settlements, tourism and health. The report provides for each sector the currently evident impacts retrieved from observations and indicators, the possible future scenarios and suggests specific mitigation and adaptation measures.
In the closing section, the overview of adopted actions and plans at local, regional and national scales in the framework of climate change allows to highlight the increasing need of more comprehensive and intersectoral strategies in the near future and to suggest possible approaches. In addition, examples of good practices to reduce individual impacts on greenhouse gas emissions are addressed to the large public, e.g. enterprises, schools, researchers and citizens, in order to promote individual awareness and the exchange between scientific community and society.