Modeling the Impact of Climatic Change on Regional Ecosystems

Pitovranov, S.E., Pegov, S., & Homiakov, P. (1984). Modeling the Impact of Climatic Change on Regional Ecosystems. IIASA Collaborative Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: CP-84-007

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Abstract

For several years researchers at IIASA have been investigating the interaction between climate and society.

In 1978, a meeting was held on "Carbon Dioxide, Climate and Society". This meeting brought together experts from around the world to assess the state of knowledge on the prospects of climatic change resulting from increasing atmospheric injections of carbon dioxide and, in particular, to review work on this subject in the IIASA Energy Systems Program. In the same year, IIASA hosted the International Workshop on Climate Issues organized by the Climate Research Board of the US National Academy of Sciences and a preparatory meeting for the World Climate Conference organized primarily by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) of the United Nations. In 1980, a Task Force meeting on the Nature of Climate and Society Research was convened to advance our knowledge of the relationship of climate to specific aspects of physical and social systems. More recently, in 1982, an international workshop on "Resource and Environmental Applications of Scenario Analysis" was organized.

Now, a major 2-year project is being implemented with the support of the UN Environmental Programme. This project is investigating the impacts of short-term climatic variations and the likely long-term effects of CO2-induced climatic changes on agricultural output at the sensitive margins of food grains and livestock production. As a part of this project, IIASA is also concerned with the effect of climate variations on ecosystem margins. One of the ecological models which is providing inputs to the project is that developed at the All-Union Institute for Systems Studies (VNIISI).

A full description (in Russian) of the model has just been completed, but will probably not be available in English for some months. The brief English description (Kroutko et al., 1982) does not define all the terms employed by the authors in the present paper; and to do so in this text has not always proven possible. As a result, readers will on occasion be given a tantalizing glimpse of the results of some model runs without having a full explanation of their meaning.

This paper reports on work in progress; the results reported here are preliminary.

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