Fires, floods, reduction in snow cover, disappearance of half of plant species ... These are some of the celebrations for Europe foreseen by the report supervised by the German Institute for Research on Climate Impacts in Potsdam (Pik ). His main conclusion? The mountainous and Mediterranean regions are expected to be those who will suffer the most by 2080.
Four scenarios. This document, published Thursday in the journal Science, brings together the work of sixteen European research institutes on the consequences in Europe of climate change, atmospheric CO2 content and land use. This study is based on four scenarios developed by the UN group of experts on the climate (IPCC), depending on the evolution of economic and energy policies. All predict a warming of 2,1 to 4,4 ° C on average in Europe in the next seventy years. For Stéphane Hallegatte, environmental economist at the Stanford Institute for International Studies and at the School of Bridges and Roads, this study is “unprecedented by the scope of the evaluation. Bringing together researchers from different horizons in the same framework makes it possible to highlight certain interactions water stress cannot be disconnected from agriculture: if there are water reserves we can irrigate, otherwise it is impossible. In addition, the tools are more sophisticated than those used by previous studies ”.