The societal and environmental impacts of global change

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TerraFIRMA will investigate five impact areas associated with climate change:

  • water resources, flooding and landslides,

  • climate change and air quality interactions,

  • wildfires,

  • marine ecosystems and

  • global sea level rise.

We will focus this analysis on three primary regions; (i) sub-Saharan Africa, (ii) the south Asian monsoon (land and ocean) and (iii) the North Atlantic and the UK.

Impacts will be assessed through several lenses:

  1. As a function of time, following different GHG emission pathways.
  2. At different levels of global warming.
  3. Considering the potential reversibility of impacts if global warming is reversed.
  4. Assessing impacts avoided through our mitigation experiments.


Working with stakeholders and collaborators we will extend our analysis to other related impacts, such as human health and global food security.

Water resources and land stability: The future resilience of water supply is a vital concern. Predicting future changes in water supply is a major challenge due to the inherent difficulty simulating precipitation, as well as the complex partitioning of water between evaporation, vegetation, soil, runoff and groundwater. Using advances in hydrological modelling and conceptualisation in combination with UKESM projections, TerraFIRMA will assess future surface water and groundwater variability and availability over Africa and the Indian subcontinent, assess the resilience of key hydrological systems (groundwater, surface water, valley glaciers) and assess the impact of future climate change pathways on water supply, inundation and landslides, developing risk maps for water and agricultural crops.

Air pollution is a major risk to human health, with global excess mortality estimated at 8.8 million/year. Climate change, particularly more frequent and intense heatwaves, will likely exacerbate air pollution, contributing to adverse human health outcomes. There is increasing interest in considering combined mitigation strategies for both climate change and air quality. We focus on the UK and the Indian subcontinent, the latter due to the large population exposed to poor air quality. We will assess the competing roles of local emissions versus the transport of remote pollutants (e.g. tropospheric ozone, PM2.5) in controlling regional air quality over the target regions, factoring the contributory role of changing climate extremes. In addition, we will assess whether remote emissions influence South Asia through their impact on large scale circulation patterns. We will develop metrics linking atmospheric circulation to urban air quality and investigate their predictive ability over South Asia and the UK and assess the co-benefits for climate and air quality from emission reductions.

Wildfires are the principal terrestrial disturbance in the Earth System, impacting vegetation, terrestrial carbon uptake, atmospheric composition, biodiversity and human activities. A warming climate is driving substantial changes in global fire regimes. In this task, we examine the drivers of future change in fire regimes over the UK and Africa, and the likely impacts of changes in extreme fire events. This work builds on two recent advances in fire modelling: i) INFERNO – which incorporates the impacts of fire on vegetation, carbon, water and energy fluxes and atmospheric composition and will be interactively coupled to UKESM2; and ii) ConFire, used to assess the likelihood and drivers of fire regime shifts and attribution of fire events.

Marine ecology and fisheries: Superimposed on the ocean’s gradual change are extreme events: heatwaves, extreme productivity regimes, coastal hypoxia (deprivation of oxygen), the intensification of which may occur abruptly as well as gradually. Heatwaves have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems, with abrupt transitions likely more harmful as marine life has less time to adapt. A systematic pattern is emerging with Western Boundary Current regions, Eastern Boundary upwelling systems and the Arctic seen as “hot spots” of marine extremes. TerraFIRMA will carry out a global analysis of marine heatwaves and anomalous productivity, de-oxygenation and acidification across the CMIP6 ensemble and then assess predicted changes in fisheries. We will assess the impact of climatically-driven changes in the South Asian (SA) monsoon on marine ecosystems and food security, addressing the extent to which marine food production can increase sustainably over the coming century.

Global sea level rise: Future sea level rise will affect millions of people in coastal areas and islands. Reliable information on the implications of overshooting key warming targets and of climate mitigation actions for sea level is crucial. We focus on projections of Global Mean Seal Level Rise (GMSLR), a key first step towards local sea-level projections. We will calculate GMSLR in the new UKESM1.1/UKESM2 mitigation and overshoot scenarios (including ice sheet mass loss, ocean thermal expansion and continental runoff) combined with developments in the Hydro-JULES LTSM, (which will allow us to estimate contributions from glacier melt and changed terrestrial water storage to GMSLR).