Sustainability Research (SRI) PhD Projects

Uncertainties in climate projections and their consequences for adaption strategies

Supervisors: Professor Piers Forster & Dr Emma Tompkins

Climate change remains one of the most pressing problems of our age. Despite improvements in our understanding of climate change over the last two decades our ability to make accurate climate projections on the regional scale remains poor. Much of this uncertainty is due to inherent variability in the Earth’s climate system and the skill of regional projections will likely remain poor. For example see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group One and Two 2007 Reports on Climate change (www.ipcc.ch). 

To date most literature on climate adaptation has not accounted for the variability in the underlying climate, nor how this may change in a warming world.  The objective of this PhD is to develop a framework for building adaption strategies accounting for physical climate uncertainties. This involves assessing uncertainty across the range of IPCC climate models for their climate impact. This will likely concentrate on regions where Emma Tompkins has already collected data on adaptive strategies (e.g. Southern Africa). We will examine how well these models reproduce past impact for the same regions and link these to climate impacts. We will use statistical methods to understand climate adaptability data and climate models for both past and present climate. We will also examine the implications of uncertainty for both individual and societal decision making.