WP1: From climate hazards to (shocks in) biomass supply

In the first work package of the BCP project, both a historical analysis and (scenario) modeling of spatial occurrences of climate extremes (droughts, extreme precipitation, wild fires) will be carried out and related to shocks in biomass harvests at the NUTS 2 level. The results and deliverables will consist of a spatial hotspot map of climate extremes in the EU, translated by a biomass damage function into hotspots of biomass supply risks under different climate scenarios in the EU.

Objectives:

  1. Analysis of spatially explicit patterns of climate extremes that will be used to produce hotspot maps of climate extremes for the EU bioeconomy;
  2. Developing empirically based biomass damage functions in response to selected climate extremes;
  3. Modeling biomass supply shocks as a function of different climate scenarios towards 2080.

Method description

We study changes in climate extremes in Europe for the last seven decades (1950–2019) based on 39 climate indices to identify climate extreme hotspots, considering frequency, co-occurrence, and consecutiveness of the extremes. These indices belong to the four climate index groups: cold, heat, drought, and precipitation. Additionally, we apply percentile-based daily thresholds to analyze historical and future hot and moist weather extremes across Europe on the NUTS2 scale based on ERA-5 Land and EUR-CORDEX data. The applied methodology for percentile-based extremes is aligned with the current state-of-art in empirical weather extremes research while we use additional meta parameters for individual weather extremes. To evaluate the impacts of individual weather extremes on European biomass supply, we use our yearly time-series of extreme events and regionalized crop data provided by Eurostat. We assess the magnitude of damages by applying a superposed epoch analysis and a data envelopment analysis to these datasets.

Expected key results

Key results of our work are maps of hot and moist weather extreme hotspots across Europe for historical and future time scales. Our results highlights that climate extremes are becoming more frequent, co-occurrent, and persistent in Europe.  Additionally, we provide valuable insights on the magnitude of damages on the European biomass supply through these weather extremes. This data is used as input for the second work package.

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