From	Tim Carter	Date	Wed, 11 Dec 1996 11:11:18 +0200
To	David Viner - Climate Impacts LINK Project
CC	Mike Hulme
Subject	ECLAT 2
Dear David/Mike, Thanks for sending me the ECLAT 2 proposal. First, let me say that I support the idea of a continued role for activities co-ordinating and facilitating the provision of climate change information for EC impacts research and other related research and policy. ECLAT 2 is one way of achieving this, but the fact that it is a Concerted Action Initiative imposes some limitations. The major limitation is that CAIs are not supposed to involve original research. They are networking activities, with a view on forging research links and developing new research projects. In my view, there is a need for a number of targetted research activities on scenario development, that might be covered by the themes of the workshops you are suggesting in ECLAT 2, but which would be best served by some dedicated research projects. It really isn't satisfactory to wait until the end of ECLAT 2 before embarking on research. Many of the key topics are already known, and although research may be proceeding in some of these areas (especially in downscaling techniques, scenario development techniques, etc.), what is still lacking is co-ordination across Europe in the selection and application of climate change scenarios in impact assessment. In my view, there are two areas in sore need of targetted research: (1) A project to analyse all available information from GCMs and historical data, which will provide some uncertainty bounds on the anticipated future climate in Europe (by region) for use in policy as well as in impacts assessment. Such a project should involve GCM groups (interpreting the GCM outputs), scenario developers (who can apply methods of generalising across a lot of GCM predictions and emissions scenarios, etc.), and a few impact analysts, who can advise on suitable scenarios for use in a variety of applications (entry level or basic scenarios). (2) A project to develop guidelines for impact analysts on the application of climate change (and related) scenarios in European impact assessments. This work would need to be linked closely to any co-ordinated, entry-level scenarios selected for use in EC projects. However, unless you have a project proposal in the pipeline at CRU (?) I don't think there is now time to develop a new proposal to meet the 15 January deadline. Comments on the draft document: 1. It is unclear to me how Figure 1 relates to the text. The arrows are not well differentiated in the fax version I have, and the boxes are not explained. 2. Similarly, Figure 2 is also misleading. It implies that there is a large transfer of information from the CC modelling community to the CC impacts community, but surely the whole function of the ECLAT SE would be to act as a filter in this transfer. Note that the title of the figure should be revised. 3. PLEASE REMOVE the reference to ECLAIR - there is no such name! This was a light- hearted emailed suggestion for ECLAT 2, not for Martin's CA which doesn't have a name to my knowledge. 4. In the suggested steering committee, I would strengthen the representation of the impacts community. This could be done by time horizon: e.g. one hydrologist to cover a range of time periods from sub-daily to century scale; one forester or soils expert for the long term, one agriculture person for the medium term (maybe I could represent this community), desertification/erosion/fire risk person for short to medium term and/or an integrated assessment person (perhaps three or four persons). You should try to avoid the group being dominated by GCM'lers (do all GCM groups have to be represented?) You might ask Ib Troen if there would be any opportunity to obtain EC funding BEFORE THE FIFTH FRAMEWORK CALL FOR PROPOSALS for a targetted research topic, if this was strongly and urgently recommended by a task group workshop. Might there be special funding from DG XI, ENRICH or the Environment Agency? Best wishes, Tim ************************************ Dr. Timothy Carter Affiliation: Agricultural Research Centre of Finland Postal address: c/o Finnish Meteorological Institute Box 503, FIN-00101 Helsinki, FINLAND Tel: +358-9-1929-4125 Fax: +358-9-1929-4129 Email: tim.carter@fmi.fi ************************************