The Climate Impacts: Global and Regional Adaptation Support Platform

Adaptation to climate change is very challenging, because it requires appropriate action at a local scale in response to global problems. At the same time, spatial and temporal uncertainty about the future manifestation of climate change stimuli and impacts is large, as is the uncertainty about the effects of adaptation measures.

ci:grasp presents and interconnects such uncertain data about climate change stimuli, impacts and adaptation measures. The challenge to find an adequate and readable representation of uncertainty in this context is large and research is just in the initial phase of providing solutions to the problem.

We are currently developing the structure required to address spatial and temporal uncertainty visibly within ci:grasp. Adaptation to sea-level rise is used as a case study to advance a useful illustration of uncertainty on the web platform.

We will identify the main sources of uncertainty and assess their importance in the adaptation (planning) process. We will adopt a typology of uncertainty distinguishing between epistemic (not enough knowledge available), natural stochastic (random processes can not be fully described), and human reflexive (statements about possible futures trigger societal action) uncertainty.