AP-PLAT participated in a workshop on climate and disaster risk informed investments in Thailand

Title	Regional Workshop on Climate and Disaster Risk-Informed Investments
Date	22-23 June 2023
Place	Bangkok, Thailand
Organizer	Asian Development Bank (ADB)
Support	Federal Ministry of Finance, Republic of Austria

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) organized Regional Workshop on Climate and Disaster Risk-Informed Investments on June 22-23, 2023, in Bangkok, Thailand. As a part of the workshop, AP-PLAT team introduced ClimoCast in an interactive session.

A two-day workshop was attended by 48 government officials from 10 Asian and Pacific countries: Armenia, Bhutan, Fiji, Georgia, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Thailand, Tonga, and Uzbekistan. The participants came from a wide range of government ministries/institutions, including ministries of finance, central banks, ministries of environment, ministries of infrastructure, ministries of economy/development, ministries of labor/social welfare, and other. Within their respective ministries/institutions, many participants worked in divisions related to sustainable finance, disaster prevention, climate change, strategic planning and investment.

Workshop context and objectives

The use of information related to natural hazards and climate variability is not new, but the risk is rapidly increasing due to climate change and due to increase in exposure and vulnerability from other global trends. The use of risk information in decision making is critical to steer development towards resilient directions. If we fail to incorporate risk information in the decisions we make today, these decisions will lock-in risks and contribute to maladaptation in the future. In this context, the workshop objectives were defined as follows:
- establish importance of climate and disaster risk informed development
- share knowledge on science and tools to enable risk-informed decision making
- use risk information in decision making for public investments
- use risk information to steer private sector investments in resilience

ClimoCast session

In line with the workshop objectives, several climate and disaster risk related tools were introduced at the workshop. ClimoCast was introduced by Slavka Sakata and Yuka Suzuki from AP-PLAT in 3 consecutive sessions. The goal was to provide a practical guide to utilizing ClimoCast for climate projections. Each session was attended by about 15-20 participants, many of whom brought their laptops and were able to actively join practical exercises. The exercises demonstrated how local level climate data (temperature, precipitation), can easily be accessed with only a few clicks using ClimoCast.

In hands-on exercises, participants were asked to answer questions with respect to their selected location. AP-PLAT lecturers provided step-by-step guidance on how to use ClimoCast to find the answers. Below is the overview of the exercises.
(In all three exercises, climate model “MIROC6”, developed by Japanese modeling community, was used for simplification. However, comparing or averaging multiple climate models is recommended as the best practice. Data from 10 major climate models can be viewed and downloaded in Climocast.)

Exercise 1

Question: How much is the temperature in your hometown projected to increase by the end of the 21st century? (Local-level climate projections)
Location chosen by participants: Tashkent (Uzbekistan)
Answer: The temperature in Tashkent is projected to increase by 4.21°C by the end of the century (2091-2100 decadal data) under a high emission scenario (SSP370) and MIROC6 climate model.

Exercise 2

Question: Which provinces in your country are projected to experience the highest temperature increase? (Identifying hot spots)
Location chosen by participants: Armenia
Answer: Armenian provinces with the highest projected temperature increase by the end of the 21st century are: Armavir (temperature increase 4.96°C), Ararat (4.87°C), Aragatsotn (4.86°C), Erevan (4.86°C) and Kotayk (4.80°C). (High emission scenario (SSP370), MIROC6 climate model).
However, in case of Armenia, the differences between provinces are small and all provinces are projected to see very high temperature increase (of over 4.6°C).

Exercise 3

Question: What is the difference in temperature change in your country between a low emission scenario and a high emission scenario? (Quantifying mitigation effect)
Location chosen by participants: Bhutan
Answer: The temperature in Bhutan is projected to increase by about 1.6°C　under low emission scenario (SSP126) and by about 3.14°C under high emission scenario (SSP370) by the end of the 21st century in MIROC6 climate model. The difference in temperature change between the two scenarios is about 1.5°C (which means that Bhutan is projected to become, on average, 1.5 degrees hotter under the high emission scenario compared to the low emission scenario.)

We would like to thank organizers for a perfectly organized and informative workshop, to lecturers for their engaging presentations, and to participants for many interesting questions as well as ideas about ClimoCast future improvements.

(Posted : 4/July/2023)