Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Climate change affects the vulnerability and productivity of forestry and agricultural systems, predominantly by changes in precipitation and temperature patterns. Indirect impacts are altered risk of damage, for example, by longer periods of drought stress and other biotic and abiotic disturbances. While southern and eastern parts of the Baltic Sea basin are likely to experience a net impact of climate change that is negative for production, northern and western regions are likely to experience a general increase in production. As a result, land-use potentials will change and will foster adaptation and mitigation measures. In the northern region, forest management adaptation may lead to substantial yield increases, while in the south management, adaptation may be required to counter deteriorating conditions. Comparable conclusions can be drawn for agricultural management: if adaptation potentials are fully exploited, substantial yield increases can be expected for certain crop species. In the southern areas and for certain species, deteriorating conditions and possibly increasing climatic variability are projected. Both climate change impacts and human responses will affect socio‐economic conditions in the Baltic Sea basin.

This chapter examines observed and potential future climate change impacts on socio-economic fields concerning urban complexes in the Baltic Sea basin. This is based on the literature review that focused mainly on English publications on climate change impacts, but included some publications in other languages on adaptation. In the Baltic Sea basin, there appears to be an imbalance between cities and towns that have been well studied with reference to climate change impacts, and cities or even regions for which there is hardly any published literature. For those publications that do exist, most concern the impact of a specific climate change effect (temperature rise, extreme events, sea-level rise) on a particular socio-economic field of an urban complex. The results of the literature review indicate that urban complexes in the Baltic Sea catchment are likely to experience climate change impacts within wide-ranging contexts: from urban services and technical infrastructure, to buildings and settlement structures and to the urban economy or population. Impacts will differ depending on the location of the urban complex: northern versus southern and coastal versus inland.

This chapter assesses to what extent the factors causing global warming affect the Baltic Sea area. Summertime near-surface warming in northern Europe exceeds natural internal variability of the climate system, and the observed warming cannot be explained without human influence. Regional changes in extreme temperatures, growing-season length and timing of the onset of spring are consistent with the large-scale signal of a human influence (mainly greenhouse gases). Shifts in large-scale circulation in the Northern Hemisphere and precipitation changes in northern Europe and the Arctic have been detected to exceed natural internal variability, but the climate models used to assess these quantities seem to underestimate the observed changes. To what extent this discrepancy between simulated and observed changes also affects the attribution of regional warming to human influence is still a matter of debate. Other aspects of regional climate change including changes in storminess, snow properties, run-off and the changing physical properties of the Baltic Sea have not been formally attributed to human influence yet.

This chapter starts by introducing the complex nature of atmospheric aerosols, their sources, formation and properties and describes how they interact with clouds. This is important background information for discussing how aerosols affect climate, both directly and indirectly by affecting the radiative properties of clouds. The complexity of the aerosol–cloud–climate interaction causes large uncertainty in the projections of future climate. Results from different modelling studies on the European region are presented, and these show that the large spatial and temporal variations in atmospheric aerosol concentrations and properties have large regional differences in their effect on climate. This chapter concludes with an example of a co-beneficial global air quality and climate change mitigation scenario.

Anthropogenic land-cover change (ALCC) is one of the few climate forcings for which the net direction of the climate response over the last two centuries is still not known. The uncertainty is due to the often counteracting temperature responses to the many biogeophysical effects and to the biogeochemical versus biogeophysical effects. Palaeoecological studies show that the major transformation of the landscape by anthropogenic activities in the southern zone of the Baltic Sea basin occurred between 6000 and 3000/2500 cal year BP. The only modelling study of the biogeophysical effects of past ALCCs on regional climate in north-western Europe suggests that deforestation between 6000 and 200 cal year BP may have caused significant change in winter and summer temperature. There is no indication that deforestation in the Baltic Sea area since AD 1850 would have been a major cause of the recent climate warming in the region through a positive biogeochemical feedback. Several model studies suggest that boreal reforestation might not be an effective climate warming mitigation tool as it might lead to increased warming through biogeophysical processes.