Keep cool in a changing climate: an integrated modelling procedure for costeffective mitigation of rising temperatures in rural landscapes

Abstract

Rising temperatures may negatively impact rural landscapes in temperate climates due to reduced yields in agriculture and forestry, an increased risk of biodiversity loss, changes in the local climate and a decrease in recreational value. One promising way to mitigate increasing land surface temperatures (LST) in rural landscapes is to implement land-use and land-cover changes as adaptation measures that retain precipitation in soils, water bodies, and groundwater to allow vegetation to evaporate more water to reduce LST in summer. We develop an integrated modelling procedure to identify cost-effective spatially differentiated adaptation measures in agriculture and forestry to mitigate LST increases. We define cost-effective adaptation in a landscape as maximizing LST mitigation for given costs. The procedure combines the results of a model that predicts the spatially differentiated effects of adaptation measures on LST with the results of an economic model that estimates the respective spatially differentiated costs in an optimisation algorithm. We demonstrate how the procedure works by applying it to the Elbe-Elster-county in Germany. We find that a substantial share of results can only be explained by considering spatially differentiated costs and mitigation impacts and not average values showing the importance of taking into account costs and impacts of measures in a spatially differentiated manner. We also compare results from our integrated modelling procedure with a (purely natural science) approach that selects those adaptation measures first which perform best in terms of LST mitigation and find that our approach leads to a better heat mitigation effect by a factor of 3.5 – 4.8.

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