Objective of JRC PESETA II project
The objective of the JRC PESETA II project (Projection of Economic impacts of climate change in Sectors of the European Union based on bottom-up Analysis) is to make a consistent multi-sectoral assessment of the impacts of climate change in Europe for the 2071-2100 time horizon. The project methodology has two distinctive features. Firstly, it is based on bottom-up biophysical impact models results. Bottom-up models take into account the relationship between climate change and biophysical impacts in a structural way, modelling all the relevant interactions and mechanisms. Secondly, the assessment is made in a consistent way, where all biophysical impact models use the same climate data, and take into account other horizontal issues. Most of the modelling work of PESETA II has been made within the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission.
The project is largely based on the knowledge and experience derived from the previous PESETA project, concluded in 2009.
JRC PESETA II project goes beyond PESETA as it considers more impact categories and more climate runs. PESETA considered the impacts in five areas: agriculture, coastal systems, river floods, tourism and human health. PESETA II extends the coverage to nine areas, adding energy, transport infrastructure, forest fires, and habitat suitability. Furthermore, while PESETA looks at four climate runs, in PESETA II up to 15 climate runs have been modelled by some of the sectoral teams.
Both PESETA and PESETA II projects have largely benefited from past DG Research projects that have developed impact modelling capabilities (e.g. the FP7 ClimateCost project) and high-resolution climate scenarios for Europe (the FP6 ENSEMBLES project). In particular, the economic assessment of PESETA II uses impact evidence on coastal impacts and agriculture in the 2080s from the FP7 ClimateCost project, which is greatly acknowledged.
Motivation of the project
The main motivation of launching the series of climate impact assessments has been to better understand how climate change can affect Europe, in order to derive useful insights for climate adaptation. That requires high resolution climate impact assessment. Therefore, for sectors where data is available, the PESETA methodology has employed high time-space resolution climate data, feeding highly detailed sector-specific impact models to estimate the biophysical impacts.
Such a structural approach, as opposed to the reduced form formulation, aims to integrate knowledge on climate impacts from the various natural science disciplines into the economic analysis in a consistent manner. In this way, the approach benefits from the many rich recent developments in modelling biophysical climate impacts and modelling regional climate change.
Results
Results of the PESETA II project are presented briefly on the pages of this website, and in full in the PESETA II final report. These replace the preliminary results which were published in the Impact Assessment accompanying the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change, 16 April 2013.
Acknowledgements
The project uses climate data from the FP6 ENSEMBLES project, and impact estimates for agriculture and sea level rise from the FP7 ClimateCost project. The authors wish to thank Daniela Jacob for providing the E1 climate data, and the members of the PESETA II project Advisory Board and JRC colleagues for their very useful comments and feedbacks.