โ Scribed by A. Henderson-Sellers
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
A vivid example of interdisciplinary environmental research of great potential benefit to every nation is the assessment of the economic, social and resource-base impacts of climate. In Australia this is especially true since our climate is extreme by any measure: It is the most arid inhabited continent; it suffers, as a result of the E1 Nifio/Southern Oscillation phenomenon, the most extreme variability in hydrology of any continent; our cities, coasts and the rural landscape are prey to tropical cyclones, severe hailstorms, droughts, floods and bushfires; we are already affected by the decreasing levels of polar stratospheric ozone; and we are faced with the possibility of slow, almost imperceptible, changes to the climate in this, the era of apparent human-induced greenhouse change.
Before any assessment of likely impacts of climatic change can be made, it must be recognized that impacts occur when the climate (as measured by one or more parameters) moves outside a zone of "beneficial use or exploitation." Such zones can, of course, be defined in very many ways and in different terms (e.g. plants, animals, people). In the future the width of these zones may, themselves, change. A diminishing zone width could, for example, be induced by economic or trade stress or by overpopulation while a widening exploitation zone width might be the result of enhanced technology, improved management practices or financial compensation in poor seasons. The changes in the width of the human beneficial exploitation zone compound the changes in the mean, variability and other statistics of the climate and, moreover, there is no reason to assume that the exploitation zone width will change only its mean value nor that it will change smoothly (cf. Tegart et al., 1990). The question at the interface of environmental modelling and continued beneficial human exploitation, which lies at the heart of research into climatic impacts, is how local to regional changes in the climate curve interact with changes in the human beneficial exploitation zone. Present-day global numerical climate models cannot distinguish between future climates with the same means but different variability and can barely simulate E1 Nifio/Southem Oscillation events (Mearns et al., 1990;Houghton et al., 1990). We do not yet know how, or even if, variability will change in the future and we have still less information about higher order statistics. For example, possible changes in autocorrelation, about which we have no information, are of great importance for climatic impacts since crops, human health, energy use and even commodity marketing respond much more dramatically to periods of extreme temperatures than to individual events (Meams et al., 1984). Research linking this wealth of unknowns is at the forefront of climatic * The above article is based on a paper given at a conference on Environmental Research in Australia held in Canberra on June 12, 1991.
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