Disaster preparationMIT researchers develop method to help communities plan for climate risk
As the devastation left by Sandy continues to reverberate, decision-makers at every level are asking: How can we be better prepared? MIT researchers developed a tool to assess regional risks of climate change and potential impacts on local infrastructure and planning; the tool helps policymakers, city planners, and others see the possible local effects of climate change, such as long-term temperature and precipitation changes, allowing local planners to evaluate risks, and how these risks could shape crops, roads, and energy infrastructure
Climate scientists cannot attribute any single weather event, whether a drought, wildfire, or extreme storm, to climate change. Extreme events, such as Hurricane Sandy, are glimpses of the types of occurrences the world could be more vulnerable to in the future. As the devastation left by Sandy continues to reverberate, decision-makers at every level are asking: How can we be better prepared?
An MIT release reports that MIT researchers have developed a new tool to help policymakers, city planners, and others see the possible local effects of climate change. Its regional projections of climate trends — such as long-term temperature and precipitation changes — allow local planners to evaluate risks, and how these risks could shape crops, roads and energy infrastructure.
“As we see more extreme events like Sandy, the importance of assessing regional impacts grows,” says lead researcher Adam Schlosser, assistant director for science research at MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “Our approach helps decision- and policymakers balance the risks … so they can better prepare their communities for future impacts climate change might bring.”
For example, Schlosser says, if a community is planning to build a bridge, it should look at, and plan for, the expected magnitude of flooding in 2050.
“In areas devastated by Sandy, the rebuilding of lost property and infrastructure will come at considerable cost and effort,” Schlosser says. “But should we rebuild to better prepare for future storms like these? Or should we prepare for stronger and/or more frequent storms? There remains considerable uncertainty in these projections and that implies risk. Our technique has been developed with these questions in mind.”
Schlosser’s research partner, Ken Strzepek, a research scientist at the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, notes policymakers are now often given little more than a set of extreme circumstances to consider.
“Policymakers don’t like extremes or worst-case scenarios,” Strzepek says, “because they can’t afford to plan for the worst-case scenarios. They like to see what is the likelihood of different outcomes. That’s what we’re giving them.”
Getting results
In this new method, the researchers quantify the likelihood of particular outcomes and add socioeconomic data, different emission levels and varying degrees of uncertainty. Their technique combines climate-model projections and analysis from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling framework. The MIT framework is itself a
