Disclaimer: The project has been completed — a comprehensive project report is available below.
How can we ensure that we meet our climate targets and adapt as best we can to the inevitable impacts of global warming? Can adaptation measures have unexpected rebound effects on other areas of life or the economy? How great is the risk that climate protection goals will be thwarted by emission-intensive adaptation measures?
KNOWING Climate researched different aspects of climate change in various European model regions. These included, for example, a decrease in soil fertility, heat waves or flooding. Climate adaptation and greenhouse gas mitigation measures and their interactions have been scrutinised – as was awareness and support for measures by local people.
The project developed a modelling framework to calculate the correlations between adaptation measures and climate change mitigation strategies to determine the optimal combination. Concrete methods have been tested and evaluated in example regions in Estonia, Germany, Italy and Spain. Based on these results, the procedure was repeated in other regions in Austria, Croatia, Germany, Spain and Vietnam in order to develop generalisable climate protection pathways.
The Baltic Environmental Forum Germany cooperated in KNOWING Climate with the climate protection management of the district of Herzogtum Lauenburg – an agricultural region east of Hamburg with numerous villages and smaller towns such as Geesthacht, Lauenburg, Mölln or Ratzeburg. In this pilot region, the area of agriculture in climate change has been considered and the topics of drought as well as humus build-up as a carbon sink and to promote the natural resilience of soils are examined closely.
