Objectives

Background

The land-use sector is both a contributor to and a potential victim of climate change. Global historical emissions from land-use are estimated to exceed those from fossil fuels by some 25% and are currently considered to be the second largest sources of GHG emissions. In Europe, the agricultural sector is the third largest sector of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 9% of EU-25 emissions and 10% of EU-15 greenhouse gas emissions and sinks are believed to be a substantial. At the same time recent drought periods and other weather extremes are responsible for a significant share of crop outages in Europe and it is predicted that climate change will increase the share of agricultural losses due to weather or climate related extreme events.

Policy induced changes in land management carry a large potential to both increase the adaptive capacity of ecosystems as well as reduce the emission burden from the land-use sector. Policy coordination of EU climate mitigation and adaptation policies with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Rural development Strategy, EU Forestry Strategy and Clean Air and Water Policies could potentially lead to a number of ancillary benefits and thereby reduce costs of compliance of any individual policy.

Main Idea

The main idea that led to this proposal is the vision of implementing a “policy-model-data fusion” concept which shall guarantee efficient and effective mitigation and adaptation in the land-use sector and maximize benefits from policy coordination with other EU policies. With respect to climate policy a few modelling teams, such as the POLES, PRIMES and IIASA RAINS/GAINS, embraced such a policy-model-data fusion concept. These models are regularly used for strategy building of future international climate policies of the European Union and are used to inform European policy makers for negotiations to implement European policies such as the European Emission Trading System and international negotiations at COPs. These models share the common feature of being data and technology rich bottom-up models. The land use sector is still poorly represented in these models and also lacks the “policy” component in the fusion concept. The CC-TAME project is designed to fill this gap by aligning and linking the currently leading and most suitable land-use models with other climate policy tools to quantify benefits from policy coordination and finally provide consistent policy analysis across sectors including the entire land-use sector. All policy models in CC-TAME are data and technology rich bottom-up models, which are fed by information from plot level simulation “experiments” which guarantees robustness of results and will illustrate the impacts and efficiency of policies on various levels of aggregation both in terms of economic impacts and on the concrete place specific concrete management practice.

Objectives

Policy Relevant Objectives

The CC-TAME project’s prime objective is to live up to the criterion “policy relevant topic” of the call. The objective is to build a strong Science-Policy interface by delivering timely, relevant and understandable information from state-of-the-art policy impact assessments to the policy community.

The specific objectives are as follows:

• Provide the necessary scientific and economic analysis for the revision of the Thematic Strategy on Air Pollution and the European Climate Change Programme by facilitating inter-sectoral coordination of consistent climate policy analysis of the land-use sector with other sectors (e.g., energy, clean air) to illustrate and quantify benefits from cross-sector policy coordination.
• Conducting consistent intra-land use sector policy analysis with respect to the CAP, Rural Development Strategy, EU Forestry Strategy and Forest Action Plan and thereby strengthen intra-sectoral policy coordination land use policy.
• Through joint development and international modelling coordination support international coordination of climate policies by providing policy relevant analysis impacts in the land-use sector which is coordinated by the DG-ENV, US EPA, NIES (Japan), and others, in particular the BRIC countries and umbrella groups like G77.
• Achieve further acceptance of modelling tools and data from stakeholders of Member States, industry and other interest groups. Building trust in scientific policy support by organizing governmental review processes of land-use data used for policy analysis and capacity building by dissemination of policy analysis tools within Europe.
• Help reduce costs of compliance with climate policy targets by better designed policies informed by scientific assessments of the efficiency (cost-benefit) and effectiveness (policy diffusion) of different policies instruments.

Scientific and Technical Objectives

The project’s expected impact is an assessment of the efficiency of current and future land use adaptation and mitigation processes and identification and quantification of the adaptation induced by policies. Thus, a scientific tool box needs to be built to quantify (scenario analysis), understand (attribute through modelling), predict and assess the impact of policies on the evolution of land use processes. This requires new scientific approaches and synthesis that bridge disciplinary boundaries and geographic scale, and place particular emphasis on the land-use sector as an integral part of the coupled biophysical-climate-human system. CC-TAME is trying to overcome this challenge by maximizing the use of the richness of place specific information and knowledge in aggregate policy analysis.

Specific scientific objectives

1. Establish and maintain the analytical capacity to assess the policy effectiveness of reducing greenhouse gases and air pollution emissions, enhance sinks, provide bioenergy and at the same time increase ecosystem resilience through bringing together established modelling tools from the relevant fields.
2. Enhance the analytical capacity of the current model implementations by including relevant new scientific findings in different fields so that the tool will be up-to-date for policy application.
3. Develop integrated Synthesis model of natural processes and human activities.
4. Achieve excellence in joint GHG and adaptation assessment within a wider framework of global change analysis bridging and seamless joining of biophysical and economic modelling.
5. Develop theoretical backgrounds, assessment strategies and uncertainty assessments for full greenhouse gas accounting and economic valuation of sink enhancement/GHG mitigation measures of terrestrial biota at the grid (polygon) and regional levels using a systematic approach.
6. Elaborate of direct linkages between full cost accounting, “Kyoto deliverables” and the UNFCCC’s objectives and principles.
7. Achieve synergetic use of all relevant sources of information, including a multitude of competing and complementary assessment models, with geographically explicit land information as a nucleus of the approach.
8. Design of the structure of an integrated information system directed towards ecological and environmental assessment under global change, which would meet UNFCCC requirements.
9. Build assessment tools for robust decision making given scientific uncertainties and potential risks from extreme climate events and changes in weather patterns using latest theories and scientific tools from financial risk management.
10. Contribute to Global Science Networks such as IGBP-IHDP-WCRP-DIVERSITAS2, IPCC, Land-use group within the Energy modelling forum.

Specific technical objectives

1. Model-data fusion: Consistent coupling of large scale geographic data with Regional Climate, Biophysical Ecosystem Management, Economic Land-use Models, which operate on different geographic scales, time scales and scientific domains. Design of static-dynamic, single-multiple output, deterministic-stochastic models and their application to the geographic area of the enlarged EU.
2. Configure the CC-TAME tools to provide on-demand analysis for ad-hoc requests for policy analysis on pressing issues.
3. Selection and integration of available and most suitable existing spatial and technical data; Update the model databases with most recent statistical data and projections for all European countries and land-use sectors.
4. Structuring the relevant GIS systems and defining potential technological links to other European and international programmes such as INSPIRE3, CORINE4, MARS5, GEO, GMES and potential user community that would allow self-organized quality improvement.
5. Achieve acceptance of modelling tools and data from stakeholders from Member States, industry and other interest groups.
6. Make the data and assessment tool available to the public via the Internet that the data can effectively be disseminated.