SCALING METHODS IN REGIONAL INTEGRATED ASSESSMENTS: FROM POINTS UPWARD AND FROM GLOBAL MODELS DOWNWARDS

This article draws upon the CLIVARA final report (see Butterfield et al. [1]), an EU project on climate change and agriculture (ENV4-CT95-0154).

Introduction

All models contain a simplification of the spatial or temporal scale of the real system, either by averaging or aggregating small scale elements or by treating large scale changes as a constant [2, 3, 4]. Three examples illustrate the importance of scale in climate change impact assessment.