Climate: observations, projections and impacts
Understanding the potential impacts of climate change is essential for informing both adaptation strategies and actions to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.
But assessing the impacts is scientifically challenging and has, until now, been fragmented. To date, only a limited amount of information about past climate change and its future impacts has been available at national level, while approaches to the science itself have varied between countries.
In April 2011, we were asked by the United Kingdom's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to begin a project to compile scientifically robust and impartial information on the physical impacts of climate change for more than 20 countries.
A report on the observations, projections and impacts of climate change has been prepared for each of those countries.
Each report contains:
- A description of key features of national weather and climate, including an analysis of new data on extremes.
- An assessment of how man-made climate change has altered the risk of temperature extremes.
- A prediction of future climate conditions, based on climate model projections used in the Fourth Assessment Report from the IPCC.
- The potential impacts of climate change, based on results from the UK's Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change programme ( AVOID) and supporting literature.
You can download the latest version of the reports:
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Argentina
(PDF, 6 MB)
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Australia
(PDF, 4 MB)
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Bangladesh
(PDF, 4 MB)
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Brazil
(PDF, 7 MB)
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China
(PDF, 10 MB)
-
Egypt
(PDF, 6 MB)
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France
(PDF, 8 MB)
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Germany
(PDF, 6 MB)
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India
(PDF, 5 MB)
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Indonesia
(PDF, 5 MB)
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Italy
(PDF, 8 MB)
-
Japan
(PDF, 5 MB)
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Kenya
(PDF, 5 MB)
-
Mexico
(PDF, 6 MB)
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Peru
(PDF, 7 MB)
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Republic of Korea
(PDF, 5 MB)
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Russia
(PDF, 8 MB)
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Saudi Arabia
(PDF, 6 MB)
-
South Africa
(PDF, 6 MB)
-
Spain
(PDF, 7 MB)
,
Spain: study limitations.
(PDF, 14 kB)
-
Turkey
(PDF, 7 MB)
-
UK
(PDF, 6 MB)
-
USA
(PDF, 5 MB)
You can also download the slides presented by Met Office scientists at COP17 in Durban -
Climate: Observations, projections and impacts - Durban 2011.
(PDF, 4 MB)
.
Your feedback
These reports will evolve over time and we welcome your feedback to the project team.
To view PDF documents you will need Adobe Reader.
