Towards a comprehensive characterization of evidence in synthesis assessments: the climate change impacts on the Brazilian water resources
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has put a lot of efforts to describe uncertainties and to judge the confidence level of its major conclusions. Despite a guidance to communicate uncertainty, the assignment of confidence is not sufficiently clear and, thus, hard to be reproduced b...
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Published in | Climatic change Vol. 155; no. 1; pp. 37 - 57 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Dordrecht
Springer Netherlands
01.07.2019
Springer Nature B.V |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has put a lot of efforts to describe uncertainties and to judge the confidence level of its major conclusions. Despite a guidance to communicate uncertainty, the assignment of confidence is not sufficiently clear and, thus, hard to be reproduced by the extern community. By conducting a synthesis assessment about the impacts of climate change on the Brazilian water resources, we identified an opportunity to illustrate the characterization of
evidence
as adopted in IPCC reports. We propose a method to describe the
evidence
from model outputs wherein the
quality
and
amount
of studies, as well as the
consistency
among their conclusions, are subject of a transparent rating procedure. In summary, the more comprehensive the study in sampling uncertainties, the higher its
quality
. Likewise, the
amount
and
consistency
among conclusions is assigned in a systematic way. The method is applied for synthesizing a collection of 42 peer-reviewed articles. It reveals important aspects about the
evidence
of the potential impacts of climate change in the Brazilian water resources, such as changes into a drier hydrological regime. However, the use of multi-model ensemble, the evaluation of models, and the observational data is limited. The proposed method enables consistent communication of the degree of
evidence
in a transparent, traceable, and comprehensive fashion. The method can be used as a tool to support experts on their judgment. The approach is reproducible and can guide synthesis work not only in Brazil but anywhere else. |
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ISSN: | 0165-0009 1573-1480 |
DOI: | 10.1007/s10584-019-02430-9 |