Local climate change projections
We design tools to simulate expected changes in future climate and assess how they may affect us through risk and vulnerability analysis.
About the project
Impacts of climate change on wetlands affected by groundwater or IMAGUA is a study funded by the call for research projects for non-profit foundations granted by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge during the year 2021.
Objectives
IMAGUA aims to:
- Analysis of the most important impacts of climate change on groundwater and associated wetlands, taking into account the climate change models of the sixth IPCC report. A proprietary methodology of statistical regionalization has been used to obtain climate scenarios at a local scale. Likewise, the relationships between meteorological conditions and groundwater behavior have been established, applying them to climate projections to obtain the impact of future climate on groundwater bodies and on the wetlands they affect.
Results
Among its main results, the following stand out:
- This study shows the need to work on a local scale on the one hand, and to extend and extrapolate these studies to other districts with different geographical characteristics in order to draw conclusions that can be extrapolated to other regions.
- It is also necessary to make the different administrations and actors involved in groundwater management aware of the future implications of climate change on their activities. In the case of the Hydrographic Confederations, it is necessary to carry out detailed studies to quantify the effect of climate change on aquifers and resources of the different Groundwater Bodies (MASb) in order to include and adjust these quantified effects in the balances of the different units with a view to the compatibility reports of the new concessions.
- It is also necessary to increase the current piezometric and quality control network of the MASb as well as the measurement frequency of said network in order to adapt the control intervals of the indicators of the state and quantitative and qualitative evolution of the aquifers to those of the climatic variables, such as rainfall, which will allow obtaining a greater temporal resolution in the adjustment between variables.
- Finally, there is a clear need to use climate scenarios based on the CMIP6 models used in the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, since the new features and improvements they incorporate over those of CMIP5 are very important, which will very probably mean that in a short time all the studies carried out with the latter will be considered scientifically obsolete.
Funded by
Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge through grants to third-sector entities or non-governmental organizations that carry out activities of general interest considered to be of social interest in the field of scientific and technical research and environmental protection under state jurisdiction. This research has been funded by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge but does not express its opinion.
