Climate Change and Tourism in Tuscany, Italy. What if heat becomes unbearable?

This paper investigates the empirical magnitude of climate conditions on tourist flows in Tuscany, exploring the use of a fine spatial scale analysis. In fact, we explore the use of an 8-year panel dataset of Tuscany’s 254 municipalities, examining how tourist inflows respond to variation in local weather conditions. In particular, as the area enjoys a fairly mild Mediterranean climate, our analysis focused on temperature extremes at key times of the tourist season, i.e., on maximum summer temperature and minimum winter temperature. Separate analyses are conducted for domestic and international tourists, so as to test the differences in the preferences among these distinct groups (or types of demand). Estimation results show the impact of climate change on tourist flows appears to vary significantly among destinations depending on the kind of attractions they offer, and those areas that host the main artistic and historical sights, affecting predominantly the domestic rather than the international tourists.Domestic Tourists, International Tourists, Municipalities, Maximum And Minimum Daily Temperature, Dynamic Model, Temperature Demand Elasticity, GMM

An Assessment of Weather-Related Risks in Europe: Maps of Flood and Drought Risks

This technical report describes the adopted methodology and the outputs produced during the first 18 months of life of the 'ADAM' project. ADAM (Adaptation and Mitigation Strategies: Supporting European Climate Policy) is an Integrated Project financed under thematic priority 'Global Change and Ecosystems' of the 6th framework programme (for further information, see www.adam.info) The task 'A2.1 - An assessment of weather-related risks in Europe' has the following main objective: 'Quantify and map weather-related extreme-event risks to public and private capital assets, human lives, and agriculture/forestry/tourism, and identify high-risk areas (hot spots) on which to focus more detailed analysis.' The key innovative aspects of the work herein presented are manifold: - the quantification of the probabilistic monetary impact of extreme events; - the combined use of modelling techniques and of observed data to supply the lack of information at the various scales of relevance of the study; - the estimation of uncertainty arising from limitations in data availability and modelling assumptions; - the geographical scale (continental) of the exercise. The key outputs of task A2.1 are digital maps of risks from natural extremes at European scale identifying monetary/economic losses. The maps are furnished as input to other tasks of package A2 for successive modelling exercises and analysis. As defined in the project work-plan, task A.21 has duration of 24 months. The 18-month deliverables are maps of flood and drought risks. The report focuses on inland river flood damage to properties and infrastructures and on climatic stresses (drought and heat waves) in agriculture. Population exposure has only been addressed in a partial study and it's therefore not included in the final monetary losses assessment. The work on floods has been carried out by the Institute for Environment and Sustainability of the Joint Research Centre; the work on droughts and heat waves by the Department of Agronomy and Land Management - University of Florence. The methodology is centred on the risk paradigm of the research community. The risk is defined as a product of hazard, exposure and vulnerability where: - Hazard is the threatening natural event including its probability/magnitude of occurrence; - Exposure is the values/humans that are present at the location related to a given event; - Vulnerability is the lack of resistance to damaging/destructive forces (damage function). This definition has been applied to extreme events such as floods and heat/water stresses, with the due adjustments required by data availability and specific modelling techniques.JRC.H.7-Land management and natural hazard

Data Integration and Modelling for the Assessment of Future Climate Change Impacts on Natural Pasturelands of the Alps

Evidence shows that in the last century in the Alps area warming was roughly three times the global average and, according to future projections, this trend is expected to worsen in the next decades. Moreover, the species-rich permanent grasslands characterizing the marginal areas of the Alpine landscape are acknowledged as very sensitive and vulnerable ecosystems to climate change (IPCC 2007). So far several studies have investigated the climate effects only on specific Alpine grassland species at a very small scale, while a comprehensive assessment of the impact of climate change on Alpine mountain grasslands distribution and composition at a territorial scale is still lacking. Building on these premises, ground-breaking tools (classification models coupled with data integration by GIS techniques) were used to identify and environmentally characterize the main pastoral communities over the Alpine chain and to assess future climate change impacts on these fragile resources

Identification of most important cropping systems and available models

For each region or agro-ecological zone in Europe the major cropping systems have been identified based on their cropping area. Next, for each of the selected cropping systems the most widely applied models that fulfil a number of criteria (including their documentation in peer reviewed publications; good user guides and documentation of code; source code available) have been identified. Some possible model comparisons have been hypothesized on the basis of cropping systems and model availability

Identification of most important cropping systems and available models

For each region or agro-ecological zone in Europe the major cropping systems have been identified based on their cropping area. Next, for each of the selected cropping systems the most widely applied models that fulfil a number of criteria (including their documentation in peer reviewed publications; good user guides and documentation of code; source code available) have been identified. Some possible model comparisons have been hypothesized on the basis of cropping systems and model availability

Climate change impacts and adaptation options in the Mediterranean basin

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Comparisons among the five ground-motion models developed using RESORCE for the prediction of response spectral accelerations due to earthquakes in Europe and the Middle East

This article presents comparisons among the five ground-motion models described in other articles within this special issue, in terms of data selection criteria, characteristics of the models and predicted peak ground and response spectral accelerations. Comparisons are also made with predictions from the Next Generation Attenuation (NGA) models to which the models presented here have similarities (e.g. a common master database has been used) but also differences (e.g. some models in this issue are nonparametric). As a result of the differing data selection criteria and derivation techniques the predicted median ground motions show considerable differences (up to a factor of two for certain scenarios), particularly for magnitudes and distances close to or beyond the range of the available observations. The predicted influence of style-of-faulting shows much variation among models whereas site amplification factors are more similar, with peak amplification at around 1s. These differences are greater than those among predictions from the NGA models. The models for aleatory variability (sigma), however, are similar and suggest that ground-motion variability from this region is slightly higher than that predicted by the NGA models, based primarily on data from California and Taiwan