Florian Wimmer
University of Kassel
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Featured researches published by Florian Wimmer.
Climatic Change | 2015
Florian Wimmer; Eric Audsley; Marcus Malsy; Cristina Savin; Robert Dunford; Paula A. Harrison; Rüdiger Schaldach; Martina Flörke
Future renewable water resources are likely to be insufficient to meet water demand for human use and minimum environmental flow requirements in many European regions. Hence, fair and equitable water allocation to different water use sectors and environmental needs is important for climate change adaptation in order to reduce negative effects on human well-being and aquatic ecosystems. We applied a system of coupled sectoral metamodels of water availability and water use in the domestic, manufacturing industry, electricity generation, and agricultural sectors to simulate the effects of generic water allocation schemes (WAS) at the European level. The relative performance of WAS in balancing adverse impacts on the water use sectors and aquatic ecosystems was analysed for an ensemble of 16 scenarios for the 2050s, which were built from the combination of four socio-economic scenarios, developed in the CLIMSAVE project, and four climate projections based on IPCC A1. The results indicate that significant physical water shortages may result from climate and socio-economic change in many regions of Europe, particularly in the Mediterranean. In the energy sector, average annual water demand can largely be met even in water allocation schemes that deprioritise the sector. However, prioritisation of agricultural water demand has significant adverse impacts on the domestic and manufacturing industry sectors. Cross-sectoral impacts were found to be lowest if at least one of the domestic and manufacturing sectors is assigned higher priority than agriculture. We conclude that adapting spatial patterns of water-intensive activities to renewable water availability across Europe, such as shifting irrigated agriculture to less water-stressed basins, could be an effective demand-side adaptation measure, and thus a candidate for support through EU policy.
Climatic Change | 2015
Abiy S. Kebede; Robert Dunford; M. Mokrech; Eric Audsley; Paula A. Harrison; Ian P. Holman; Robert J. Nicholls; Sophie Rickebusch; Mark Rounsevell; Santiago Sabaté; Florian Sallaba; Anabel Sánchez; Cristina Savin; Mirek Trnka; Florian Wimmer
Integrated cross-sectoral impact assessments facilitate a comprehensive understanding of interdependencies and potential synergies, conflicts, and trade-offs between sectors under changing conditions. This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of a European integrated assessment model, the CLIMSAVE integrated assessment platform (IAP). The IAP incorporates important cross-sectoral linkages between six key European land- and water-based sectors: agriculture, biodiversity, flooding, forests, urban, and water. Using the IAP, we investigate the direct and indirect implications of a wide range of climatic and socio-economic drivers to identify: (1) those sectors and regions most sensitive to future changes, (2) the mechanisms and directions of sensitivity (direct/indirect and positive/negative), (3) the form and magnitudes of sensitivity (linear/non-linear and strong/weak/insignificant), and (4) the relative importance of the key drivers across sectors and regions. The results are complex. Most sectors are either directly or indirectly sensitive to a large number of drivers (more than 18 out of 24 drivers considered). Over twelve of these drivers have indirect impacts on biodiversity, forests, land use diversity, and water, while only four drivers have indirect effects on flooding. In contrast, for the urban sector all the drivers are direct. Moreover, most of the driver–indicator relationships are non-linear, and hence there is the potential for ‘surprises’. This highlights the importance of considering cross-sectoral interactions in future impact assessments. Such systematic analysis provides improved information for decision-makers to formulate appropriate adaptation policies to maximise benefits and minimise unintended consequences.
Archive | 2012
Jennifer Koch; Florian Wimmer; Janina Onigkeit
The Jordan River region (Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian National Authority (PA)) is one of the most water scarce regions of the world. The total renewable water resource values in the Jordan River region are 52 to 535 m3 per capita and year [15], which is far below the threshold value of 1000 m3 per capita and year indicating chronic water scarcity [14]. On average, water resources withdrawn for agricultural activities, such as irrigated crop production, amount to two thirds of the total actual renewable water resources in the Jordan River region [17]. This makes the agricultural sector the region’s major water user and shows the strong regional impact of agricultural land-use activities on water resources. Besides the effect on water resources, land-use activities also have a considerable effect on other natural resources [20]. Examples are desertification caused by maladjusted land management policies [1, 4], biodiversity loss due to habitat destruction and fragmentation [41, 64], and salinization of land induced by irrigation [22]. Current pressures on natural resources in the Jordan River region are likely to aggravate in the future due to high projected population growth rates, economic development, and changing climate conditions. This may cause a further degradation of the region’s ecosystems and reduce their capacity to provide ecosystem services in the long run. Hence, there is an urgent need for a better understanding of the complex relationships in these human-environmental systems, in order to develop sustainable management strategies for the use of natural resources in the Jordan River region.
Science of The Total Environment | 2018
Jennifer Koch; Florian Wimmer; Rüdiger Schaldach
The landscape surrounding urban areas is often used as farmland. With the observed expansion of urban areas over the last decades and a projected continuation of this trend, our objective was to analyze how urbanization affects food supply and demand in The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. We used a chain of simulation models covering components of the atmosphere (climate simulations), biosphere (crop yield calculations), and anthroposphere (simulations of urban expansion and land-use change) to calculate the effect of farmland displacement on land and water resources (hydrosphere). Our simulations show that the displacement of farmland itself has hardly any effect on cropland demand, crop yields, or irrigation water requirements. These results indicate that Jordan has sufficient productive areas available to buffer effects of urban expansion on food production for the next decades. However, this picture changes dramatically once we include changes in socioeconomy and climate in our simulations. The isolated effect of climate change results in an expected increase in irrigation water requirements of 19 MCM by 2025 and 64 MCM by 2050. It furthermore leads to an increase in cropland area of 147 km2 by 2025 and 265 km2 by 2050. While the combined analysis of urban expansion, climate change, and socioeconomic change makes optimistic assumptions on the increase in crop yields by 2050, the results still indicate a pronounced effect on cropland demands (2700 km2) and a steep increase in irrigation water requirements (439 MCM). Our simulation results highlight the importance of high resolution, spatially explicit projections of future land changes as well as the importance of spatiotemporal scenario studies at the regional level to help improving water planning strategies.
Regional Environmental Change | 2018
Stefan Fronzek; Timothy R. Carter; Nina Pirttioja; Rob Alkemade; Eric Audsley; Harald Bugmann; Martina Flörke; Ian P. Holman; Yasushi Honda; Akihiko Ito; Victoria Janes-Bassett; Valentine Lafond; Rik Leemans; Marc Mokrech; Sarahi Nunez; Daniel L. Sandars; Rebecca S. Snell; Kiyoshi Takahashi; Akemi Tanaka; Florian Wimmer; Minoru Yoshikawa
Responses to future changes in climatic and socio-economic conditions can be expected to vary between sectors and regions, reflecting differential sensitivity to these highly uncertain factors. A sensitivity analysis was conducted using a suite of impact models (for health, agriculture, biodiversity, land use, floods and forestry) across Europe with respect to changes in key climate and socio-economic variables. Depending on the indicators, aggregated grid or indicative site results are reported for eight rectangular sub-regions that together span Europe from northern Finland to southern Spain and from western Ireland to the Baltic States and eastern Mediterranean, each plotted as scenario-neutral impact response surfaces (IRSs). These depict the modelled behaviour of an impact variable in response to changes in two key explanatory variables. To our knowledge, this is the first time the IRS approach has been applied to changes in socio-economic drivers and over such large regions. The British Isles region showed the smallest sensitivity to both temperature and precipitation, whereas Central Europe showed the strongest responses to temperature and Eastern Europe to precipitation. Across the regions, sensitivity to temperature was lowest for the two indicators of river discharge and highest for Norway spruce productivity. Sensitivity to precipitation was lowest for intensive agricultural land use, maize and potato yields and Scots pine productivity, and highest for Norway spruce productivity. Under future climate projections, North-eastern Europe showed increases in yields of all crops and productivity of all tree species, whereas Central and East Europe showed declines. River discharge indicators and forest productivity (except Holm oak) were projected to decline over southern European regions. Responses were more sensitive to socio-economic than to climate drivers for some impact indicators, as demonstrated for heat-related mortality, coastal flooding and land use.
Archive | 2018
Liselotte Schebek; J. Mizgajski; Rüdiger Schaldach; Florian Wimmer
The expected increase in palm oil production for food and biofuels has raised large concerns about land-use change and greenhouse gas emissions. The pressure to convert land into oil palm plantations can be widely observed in Indonesia. So far, Indonesia has not been effective in protecting its land resources from this pressure largely because of the weak enforcement of its own policies. Thus understanding the opportunities to improve the policy enforcement in relation to the land resources is critical to design successful strategies for land management in Indonesia. This study simulated land-use changes in Indonesia under three policy scenarios and different projections of palm oil production by 2020. This enabled us to illustrate the effects of the improvements of the policy enforcement on land-use change and CO2 emission triggered by the growing demand for palm oil. We projected a large increase in deforestation, ranging from 3.06 to 4.89 million hectare if no improvements are made in the policy enforcement, which would result in 194.83–499.89 Mt of CO2 emission. Better policy enforcement can bring significant mitigation effects in terms of land-use change, as it can reduce deforestation by 50–53%. The effects of enhanced policy enforcement on CO2 emission from land-use change is even more significant. It can reduce CO2 emission by 84–87%. Therefore, our results highlighted that the current policies have a substantial potential to protect land resources against the growing pressure on land conversion from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. In order to make such existing policies effective, the government must put considerable efforts on the proper and unconditional enforcement of the policies.
Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics | 2006
Thomas Foken; Florian Wimmer; Matthias Mauder; Christoph Thomas; Claudia Liebethal
Global Environmental Change-human and Policy Dimensions | 2013
Martina Flörke; Ellen Kynast; Ilona Bärlund; Stephanie Eisner; Florian Wimmer; Joseph Alcamo
Theoretical and Applied Climatology | 2010
Thomas Foken; Matthias Mauder; Claudia Liebethal; Florian Wimmer; Frank Beyrich; Jens-Peter Leps; Siegfried Raasch; Henk A. R. DeBruin; W. M. L. Meijninger; Jens Bange
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences | 2013
Giovanni Forzieri; Luc Feyen; Rodrigo Rojas; Martina Flörke; Florian Wimmer; Alessandra Bianchi