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Creating Impact Functions to Estimate the Domestic Effects of Global Climate Action
Citation:
Creating Impact Functions to Estimate the Domestic Effects of Global Climate Action . CLIMATIC CHANGE. Springer, New York, NY.
Impact/Purpose:
To characterize the relationship between an amount of future climate change and the magnitude of impacts across sectors, which can provide an efficient method for estimating large scale impacts across various emission futures.
Description:
Quantifying and monetizing the impacts of climate change can be challenging due to the complexity of impacts, availability of data, variability across geographic and temporal time scales, sources of uncertainty, and computational constraints. Recent advancements in using consistent analytic frameworks to estimate impacts under multiple scenarios are providing the necessary data to directly compare results across sectors. This also allows for the characterization of the relationship between an amount of future climate change and the magnitude of impacts across sectors, which can provide an efficient method for estimating large scale impacts across various emission futures. Based on results from detailed, process-based physical models, this paper presents an approach to characterizing climate impact functions through 2100 for more than 20 impacts in the United States. Statistical relationships are specified and described using temperature only and temperature and precipitation predictors, and illustrative results characterize uncertainty across climate models and the statistical estimation uncertainty of the reduced form approach. Although a number of important caveats exist, these relationships can be applied to alternative scenarios to provide insight on the potential magnitude of future impacts.