A team of authors, including some CMCC scientists realized a preliminary attempt to describe and evaluate the main features of available DSS for the assessment and management of climate change impacts on coastal area and related inland watershed.
“Inventory of GIS-Based Decision Support Systems Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Coastal Waters and Related Inland Watersheds” (F. Iyalomhe, J. Rizzi, S. Torresan, V. Gallina, A. Critto and A. Marcomini) is a chapter of the book Climate Change – Realities, Impacts Over Ice Cap, Sea Level and Risks. Authors illustrate and rate twenty DSS designed to support the decision-making process related to climate change and environmental issues in coastal environments – including inland watersheds. The work highlights major features and applicability of each DSS in order to help the reader in the selection of DSS tailored on his specific application needs.
A Decision Support System (DSS) is a computer-based software that can assist decision makers in their decision process, supporting rather than replacing their judgment and, at length, improving effectiveness over efficiency. Environmental DSS are in particular models based tools that cope with environmental issues and support decision makers in the sustainable management of natural resources and in the definition of possible adaptation and mitigation measures
The review highlighted:
- the relevance of developing climate change impact assessment and management at the regional scale (i.e. subnational and local scale). Climate change impacts are in fact very dependent on regional geographical features, climate and socio-economic conditions and regionally-specific information can assist coastal communities in planning adaptation measures to the effects of climate change.
- the need to adopt “ecosystem approaches”, considering the complex dynamics and interactions between coastal systems and other systems closely related to them (e.g. coastal aquifers, surface waters, river basins, estuaries), and the need of adoption of multi-risk approaches in order to consider the interaction among different climate change impacts that affect the considered region.
Above all, the study remarks the need to involve the end users and relevant stakeholders since the initial steps of the development process of these tools, in order to satisfy their actual requirements, especially in the perspective of providing useful climate services, and to avoid the quite often and frustrating situation where time and resource demanding DSS are not used beyond scientific testing exercises.
Read the full chapter:
F. Iyalomhe, J. Rizzi, S. Torresan, V. Gallina, A. Critto and A. Marcomini (2013). Inventory of GIS-Based Decision Support Systems Addressing Climate Change Impacts on Coastal Waters and Related Inland Watersheds, Climate Change – Realities, Impacts Over Ice Cap, Sea Level and Risks, Prof. Bharat Raj Singh (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-51-0934-1, InTech, DOI: 10.5772/51999
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