I am pleased to announce that much of the research from this project and the OpenCLIM project for Northern Ireland has now been published in the journal of Climate Risk Management. The peer review process can take some time, so I apologise for the delay!
The paper specifically brings together data that is both quantitative (i.e. numbers) and qualitative (i.e. stories) from climate impact models and local people in Northern Ireland who I had the fortune to meet and interview during the Once Upon a Time in a Heatwave project. It highlights that using both of these types of data together paints a more nuanced and holistic picture of how climate change is impacting and will continue to impact Northern Ireland – more so than would be possible using either of these data types in isolation.
Here are two examples that are discussed in greater depth in the paper.
Northern Ireland isn’t that hot compared to the rest of the UK. In fact, if you use a climate impact model to calculate the risk of heat stress on workers, then it suggests there will be no serious risk, even in a world that is 4 °C warmer than pre-industrial times. However, when I spoke to care providers in Castlederg, they said that already there are many days per summer when working conditions can be uncomfortably hot for staff. Therefore, the local knowledge highlights that this is a risk. The modelling data highlights that this risk will be a bigger problem in the future, even if the models fail to represent the micro-scale conditions inside an individual care home.
Models also suggest a wide range of potential changes in crop yields, due to a few different uncertainties, for example how crops will respond to increased CO2 in future. On average, all models suggest that yields of crops such as perennial rye grass will increase, but it is uncertain by quite how much by. However, farmers across Northern Ireland reported at workshops that variable weather conditions were already impacting their practices. In some cases, grass yields were adversely affected due to dry weather for example. In other cases, although there were good yields of grass, waterlogging of soils meant that cattle could not graze the fields. These insights from farmers highlights the need to to look beyond the headline figures and average climatological conditions and instead focus on local spatial and temporal scales where impacts will be felt.
This is just scratching the surface, however. There are still many more results that could be and I hope will be explored in future research.
Spurred on by the publication of this work, I plan to publish a few more stories and insights I gained during this project, which will also have the added benefit of hindsight and further learning and research I have done in the past 2 and a half years since the project officially finished. I hope that someone might find these insights useful, and hope to be able to keep telling new, interesting and inspiring stories about Northern Ireland’s changing climate in the years to come.