Using future climate scenarios to support today’s decision making

Scottish public bodies need to make long-term investment and planning decisions considering climate change risks. Examples include planning where to build a new development considering the risk of coastal flooding or planning for the expected increase in winter disruption to services in the coming decades.

Climate scenario analysis is a tool and process developed to help answer questions like these. It assesses the impact of different plausible future climate change scenarios on an organisation, project or strategy.

This study reviewed climate scenario policies, guidance and stakeholder insights, and examined practices and publicly available data.

Findings

Long-term public-sector investment and planning decisions should be based on climate risk information and approaches that are:

• consistent across the public sector eg they use the same scenarios, look at similar time horizons and use the same data to assess the same hazards
• based on information that is up-to-date, accurate, useable and freely available
• consistent with climate risk information they are required to use for other purposes

A data review indicated a relatively complex data landscape. Data availability varied significantly depending on the climate hazard. There is a lack of standardisation across data providers when it comes to scenarios, temporal and spatial resolution, and data format. These factors are a significant source of frustration for stakeholders. 

Based on the findings, the researchers make recommendations for the development of a practical scenario analysis tool to help public bodies in climate adaptation planning. Many of the principles can also be applied to resilience and mitigation planning.

For further details, please read the report.

If you require the report in an alternative format, such as a Word document, please contact info@climatexchange.org.uk or 0131 651 4783.