Topic C: Environmental health assessment . Abstract TH010

1. Topic C: Environmental health assessment. Abstract TH010 Comeseeour platform presentationonThursday 19.,12.30-12.50 hrs in the White 1 hall, session CS01B • WHAT WE KNOW • Terrestrial global change signifies changes in the physical growth environment (water and nutrient cycles, heat regimes, acidifying and ecotoxic substances, ozone, and CO2). • Effects on ecosystems in response to global change will be diverse in time and space. Ecosystem damages should be assessed from fine resolution dynamic spatial models with detailed soil, climate and ecosystem state and function (process) data adopting an ecosystem view and a landscape perspective. • WHAT WE DON’T KNOW • The extent of growth environment changes. These depend on socio-economic scenarios of the future including population growth, technological development, life styles, mitigation activities (climate policy) and societal efforts within ecosystem conservation and restoration activities. • The sensitivity of many species and ecosystems towards global environment changes • Worldwide detailed descriptions of ‘valuable’ ecosystems and their species assemblies • WHAT WE NEED – a global assessment of ecosystem services and their relation with global change and biodiversity loss. THE MODELLING CHALLENGE FOR ECOSYSTEM SERVICES Modelling of future damages to ecosystem services requires a mix of assessment and valuation techniques. Market economy based provisioning ecosystem services (ES) can be described (e.g. agriculture and forest yields, and traded CO2 emissions). Damages to provisioning services can be measured as insured economic losses. For ES without market it’s more difficult, e.g. supporting and regulating services. Climate change damage functions in LCA – (2) data availability and selection of indicatorsIngeborg Callesen1,2, Beier, C.2, Bagger Jørgensen R.2, Olsen, S.I.1 and Hauschild, M.Z.1 1DTU Management Engineering, Section for QuantitativeSustainabilityAssessment2Biosystems division, Risø DTU, TechnicalUniversity of Denmark, Frederiksborgvej 399, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark. inca@risoe.dtu.dk. Keywords for sustainability assessments: ECOSYSTEM VIEW – LANDSCAPE PERSPECTIVE – RELEVANT SCALES IN TIME AND SPACE Suggested ranking of ‘game changing’ drivers for ecosystem change by severity: Flooding > land use change > invasive species, local extirpations, nitrogen saturation, acidification, ozone, toxic compounds, changed precipitation, temperature and wind regimes. Data: The www is full of on-line data. What to choose for LCIA of climatedamage? Future ecosystem services: Q: If global warming potential is the midpoint what is then the endpoint damage ? A: Loss of ecosystem services or loss of biodiversity ? Terrestrial global changeleads to changes in ecosystem services Abstract : The unknown magnitude of future GHG emissions and the complexity of the climate-carbon system induce large uncertainties in the projected changes in the Area of protection ‘Natural environment’. These may together be termed ‘global change’. A changed climate may result in new interactions between global change drivers and new directions of ecosystem change due to differing adaptive capacities of biota and new species assemblages in ecosystems with consequences for e.g. biodiversity. Within the framework ‘ecosystem services’ both marketed and non-marketed utilities of the natural environment are formulated. Provisioning, cultural, supporting, and regulating ecosystem services have been described. How will these services be affected by the increasing atmospheric GHG concentrations ? How can the changes be expressed in a damage model for LCIA? For the area of protection ‘Natural environment’ both sensitive and robust responses to climate change may be foreseen for different species within ecosystems and between ecosystems. A common metric may thus show high variability. Plural metrics may be needed to adequately describe the variety of different ecosystem services in different regional settings. Q: WHAT WE SUGGEST FOR LCIA re: impactcategory ’climatechange’ ? A: Adoption of the ’global change’ worldview – focusonimportantpossible, clearly negative interactionsbetweenotherdamage drivers and climatechangedamageon the naturalenvironment and thusonecosystem services. Observation-basedon-lineaccessindicators from the science and the management/policy domains. Examples of subjectareas of future ES indicators: Figure 1. F1-F6 arepossibledamagefunctions of cumulative global changepressures for differentenvironmental services. Onthattimescaleclimatechangewillbe prominent, and interactingwith most other drivers willoccur. Modeling of possibledamageswillrequiresocio-economic scenarios. SCENARIO ??