Abstracts - Posters

Mapping Regional Vulnerability to Climate Change on Agriculture

Bing Rong
University of British Columbia
brong@sdri.ubc.ca

This paper describes the methodology, data sources used to create the regional vulnerability maps on agriculture in Ningxia, China. Vulnerability is the degree to which a system or unit is likely to experience harm due to exposure to perturbations or stress. The approach to developing the vulnerability maps is based on the IPCC definition of vulnerability as a function of adaptive capacity, sensitivity, and exposure. Indexes of adaptive capacity, climate and non-climatic sensitivity, climate change exposure are constructed to examine the vulnerability to climate change in the region; while the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is used to prioritize indicators to assess the potential contributions of various aspects to systems' coping capacities. Adaptive capacity for agriculture is considered to be an outcome of biophysical, socio-economic, and technological factors. Climate exposure is determined through the use of scenario results from the Hadley Center's PRECISE regional climate model. Web based GIS tools is introduced to classify data and visualize results in a case study.

2005-04-06