Hans-Martin Füssel

Hans-Martin Füssel
European Environment Agency (EEA) | EEA · Climate, Energy and Transport (CET)

PhD

About

73
Publications
166,117
Reads
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8,269
Citations
Additional affiliations
May 1996 - May 2010
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Position
  • Senior Researcher

Publications

Publications (73)
Book
Full-text available
This assessment identifies 36 climate risks with potentially severe consequences across Europe. The risks are evaluated in the contexts of risk severity, policy horizon (lead time and decision horizon), policy readiness and risk ownership. It further identifies priorities for EU policy action, based on a structured risk assessment united with quali...
Technical Report
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This report aims to update our knowledge of water stress (a general term that includes drought and water scarcity) in Europe to inform policymakers and interested stakeholders about the current state of play.
Article
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The projected global temperature increase in the 21st century is expected to have consequences on energy consumption due to increase (decrease) in energy demand to cool (heat) the built environments. Such increase (decrease) also depends on the number of end users for such energy, thus it is crucial to include population into the analyses. This stu...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter establishes a foundation for understanding adaptation by reviewing core concepts related to adaptation, with a focus on mapping out broad categories of needs and options. Here we use adaptation needs to refer to circumstances requiring information, resources, and action to ensure safety of populations and security of assets in response...
Book
Full-text available
This briefing is a collaborative effort of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change, a global academic collaboration focused on tracking the links between health and climate change through a series of more than 45 indicators, and the European Environment Agency (EEA), an European Union agency tasked to provide sound, independent informatio...
Book
Full-text available
The EEA assessment ‘Adaptation challenges and opportunities for the European energy system’ analyses the needs for climate change adaptation and climate resilience in Europe’s energy system now and in the future. This assessment supports the clean energy transition, which involves a massive expansion of renewable energy sources, many of which are s...
Article
Full-text available
During the last decades, the effects of global warming have become apparent also in Europe, causing relevant impacts in many sectors. Under projected future global warming, such a tendency can be expected to persist until the end of this century and beyond. Identifying which climate-related impacts are likely to increase, and by how much, is an imp...
Chapter
Full-text available
Since 2003, Europe has experienced several extreme summer heat waves. Such heat waves are projected to occur as often as every 2 years in the second half of the 21st century, under a high emissions scenario (RCP8.5). The impacts will be particularly strong in southern Europe. Heavy precipitation events have increased in northern and north-eastern E...
Book
Full-text available
This European Environment Agency (EEA) report is an indicator-based assessment of past and projected climate change and its impacts on ecosystems and society. It also looks at society’s vulnerability to these impacts and at the development of adaptation policies and the underlying knowledge base. This is the fourth ‘Climate change, impacts and vuln...
Chapter
Full-text available
Climate change is already affecting terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity and is projected to become an even more important driver of biodiversity and ecosystem change in the future (Kovats et al., 2014; Urban, 2015). Climate change will have a broad range of positive and negative impacts on biodiversity at genetic, species (e.g. plant and animal...
Chapter
Full-text available
Adaptation actors are generally encouraged to develop adaptation strategies that are robust in the presence of unavoidable uncertainties. However, where can they obtain information on key uncertainties relevant to their decisions? In response to this question, we review the consideration of key uncertainties in the knowledge base for adaptation pla...
Book
Climate change highlights the challenges for long-term policy making in the face of persistent and irreducible levels of uncertainties. It calls for the development of flexible approaches, innovative governance and other elements that contribute to effective and adaptive decision-making. Exploring these new approaches is also a challenge for those...
Book
Full-text available
This European Environment Agency (EEA) report presents information on past and projected climate change and related impacts in Europe, based on a range of indicators. The report also assesses the vulnerability of society, human health and ecosystems in Europe and identifies those regions in Europe most at risk from climate change. Furthermore, the...
Article
Supporting adaptation to climate change in poor vulnerable countries is an ethical and legal obligation that arises from the very uneven distribution of responsibility for and vulnerability to climate change. A fair global regime for adaptation funding is needed where contributions are determined by the economic capability of countries and by their...
Chapter
Many studies have assessed the vulnerability of countries, regions, and population groups to the adverse impacts of climate change in order to identify priorities for action. These studies have sometimes come to rather different conclusions on the vulnerability of different countries and the relationship between vulnerability and poverty. This chap...
Chapter
Climate change is a major threat to coastal populations around the world. This chapter starts by briefly describing the main effects of global climate change on coastal areas, such as the risk of flooding, the permanent inundation of inhabited areas, and salinisation of coastal groundwater resources. This is followed by a discussion of particularly...
Chapter
Climate change will have major implications on the global water cycle. Precipitation will increase in some regions but decrease in others. Snow will melt earlier in the season, and many glaciers are projected to disappear during this century. Furthermore, the increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere will affect the water balance of...
Chapter
Climate impacts on agriculture strongly depend on regional and local circumstances. While positive and negative effects of climate change on global agriculture may on average almost compensate each other, the uneven spatial distribution is likely to harmfully affect food security in many regions. Food security could be severely threatened, if tippi...
Article
Full-text available
While it is generally asserted that those countries who have contributed least to anthropogenic climate change are most vulnerable to its adverse impacts some recently developed indices of vulnerability to climate change come to a different conclusion. Confirmation or rejection of this assertion is complicated by the lack of an agreed metric for me...
Article
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate change combine dynamic descriptions of the energy‐economy system, the climate system, and climate impacts to support the formulation of global, and possibly regional, climate policy. Originally they have been designed to inform mitigation policy but some of them are now applied in the context of adapta...
Article
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate change combine dynamic descriptions of the energy‐economy system, the climate system, and climate impacts to support the formulation of global, and possibly regional, climate policy. Originally they have been designed to inform mitigation policy but some of them are now applied in the context of adapta...
Article
Full-text available
Adaptation to climate change is necessary, in addition to mitigation of climate change, to avoid unacceptable impacts of anthropogenic climate change [IPCC 2007]. UNFCCC Article 4 requires developed countries to assist developing countries that are "particularly vulnerable" to climate change in meeting costs of adaptation to its adverse effects. As...
Article
Full-text available
This paper was elaborated by more than 50 scientists from three dozen research institutions and agencies all over Europe. It provides key messages and graphs supported by thorough and more technical reviews of the corresponding scientific state of knowledge. The paper can help to address the information needs of a wide audience, including policy-ma...
Article
Full-text available
The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007 presents the most complete and authoritative assessment of the status of scientific knowledge on all aspects of climate change. This paper presents an updated assessment of the risks from anthropogenic climate change, based on a comprehensive review of the pertinent scientific literature pub...
Article
Full-text available
de Bruin et al. (Clim Change, 2009) report on an expert assessment aimed at prioritizing adaptation options in several climate-sensitive sectors of the Netherlands. Their results show that even in a country with high economic, institutional and technical capacity, it is not currently feasible to prioritize national-level adaptation options based on...
Article
Full-text available
Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...
Article
Full-text available
Article 2 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [United Nations (1992) http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf. Accessed February 9, 2009] commits signatory nations to stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that "would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI) with the clima...
Article
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This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
Article
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This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
Article
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This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
Conference Paper
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This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.
Article
We apply probabilistic runoff projections to assess the implications of greenhouse gas-induced changes in runoff on international equity. Projections of future runoff are taken directly from a GCM ensemble and from a dynamic global vegetation and hydrological model (LPJmL 3.2) driven by climate projections from several GCMs. We investigate the rela...
Article
Within coupled hydrological simulation systems, taking socio-economic processes into account is still a challenging task. In particular, systems that aim at evaluating impacts of climatic change on large spatial and temporal scales cannot be based on ...
Article
This paper describes the development and first results of the “Community Integrated Assessment System” (CIAS), a unique multi-institutional modular and flexible integrated assessment system for modelling climate change. Key to this development is the supporting software infrastructure, SoftIAM. Through it, CIAS is distributed between the communitie...
Article
Full-text available
Climate change adaptation assessments aim at assisting policy-makers in reducing the health risks associated with climate change and variability. This paper identifies key characteristics of the climate-health relationship and of the adaptation decision problem that require consideration in climate change adaptation assessments. It then analyzes wh...
Article
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Climate change adaptation assessments aim at assisting policy-makers in reducing the health risks associated with climate change and variability. This paper identifies key characteristics of the climate- health relationship and of the adaptation decision problem that require consideration in climate change adaptation assessments. This paper further...
Article
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Planned adaptation to climate change denotes actions undertaken to reduce the risks and capitalize on the opportunities associated with global climate change. This paper summarizes current thinking about planned adaptation. It starts with an explanation of key adaptation concepts, a description of the diversity of adaptation contexts, and a discuss...
Article
Full-text available
The term ‘vulnerability’ is used in many different ways by various scholarly communities. The resulting disagreement about the appropriate definition of vulnerability is a frequent cause for misunderstanding in interdisciplinary research on climate change and a challenge for attempts to develop formal models of vulnerability. Earlier attempts at re...
Article
One of the main arguments brought forward in favour of the continued use of simple climate-economy models is their transparency, which should enable researchers to easily interpret the simulation results and adapt the model to their specific research interests. We investigate the degree to which this claim is supported in the case of the DICE model...
Article
This paper reviews the application of social welfare functions (SWFs) in welfare-maximizing climate policy analysis. We identify several methodological inconsistencies, analyze their policy implications, discuss the theoretical questions raised by them, and provide recommendations for future studies. Our review finds that several SWFs applied in cl...
Article
Full-text available
Vulnerability is an emerging concept for climate science and policy. Over the past decade, efforts to assess vulnerability to climate change triggered a process of theory development and assessment practice, which is reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This paper reviews the historical development of th...
Book
The book represents the results of the cCASHh study that was carried out in Europe (2001-2004), co-ordinated by WHO and supported by EU Programmes. The flood events in 2002 and the heat wave of August 2003 in Europe had given evidence in a rather drastic way of our vulnerability and our non preparedness. The project has produced very important res...
Article
Simple climate-economy models are still being used for climate policy analysis, despite the limitations associated with their lack of regional and process detail. The main argument brought forward in favor of these models is their relative transparency, which should enable researchers to easily interpret the simulation results and adapt the model d...
Article
Diese Dissertation beschreibt die Entwicklung und Anwendung des Klimawirkungsmoduls des ICLIPS-Modells, eines integrierten Modells des Klimawandels ('Integrated Assessment'-Modell). Vorangestellt ist eine Diskussion des gesellschaftspolitischen Kontexts, in dem modellbasiertes 'Integrated Assessment' stattfindet, aus der wichtige Anforderungen an d...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Anthropogenic climate change will affect the distribution and urgency of health risks around the world. However, the majority of adverse health impacts of climate change can be avoided by implementing suitable adaptation policies. Planned adaptation to the health impacts of climate change comprises a broad range of public health interventions. Most...
Article
Full-text available
This paper presents the ICLIPS Impacts Tool, a graphical user interface that provides access to a large set of climate impact response functions (CIRFs) from the ICLIPS model, an integrated assessment model of climate change. Its reduced-form impact module is comprised of CIRFs that depict the regional sensitivity of selected climate-sensitive impa...
Article
Full-text available
A critical issue for policymakers in defining mitigation strategies for climate change is the availability of appropriate evaluation tools. The development of climate impact response functions (CIRFs) is our reaction to this challenge. CIRFs depict the response of selected climate-sensitive impact sectors across a wide range of plausible futures. T...
Article
Full-text available
An integrated assessment model (IAM) conceived in the vein ofthe inverse approach is introduced. The model is designed tohelp social actors in making informed judgments about climatechange impact targets, mitigation costs, and implementation mechanisms.Based on these normative decisions, the model verifies whetherthere exist long-term future emissi...
Article
Full-text available
The computational burden associated with applications of theTolerable Windows Approach (TWA) considerably exceeds that oftraditional integrated assessments of global climate change. Aspart of the ICLIPS (Integrated Assessment of Climate ProtectionStrategies) project, a computationally efficient climate model hasbeen developed that can be included i...
Article
An integrated assessment model (IAM) is applied to explore optionsfor long-term climate policy by identifying permitted emissioncorridors. The options are determined under various assumptionsabout constraints related to acceptable impacts of climate changein terms of alterations induced in natural ecosystems in protectedareas and about acceptable m...
Article
THE UNIQUE combination of features that characterize the climate change problem-diversity of temporal and spatial scales, complexities of the processes involved, and the multitude of social values and interests affected-requires novel frameworks of scientific inquiry.
Article
We introduce climate impact response functions as a means for summarizing and visualizing the responses of climate-sensitive sectors to changes in fundamental drivers of global climate change. In an inverse application, they allow the translation of thresholds for climate change impacts (‘impact guard-rails’) into constraints for climate and atmosp...
Article
The Tolerable Windows Approach (TWA) to Integrated Assessments (IA) of global warming is based on external normative specifications of tolerable sets of climate impacts as well as proposed emission quotas and policy instruments for implementation. In a subsequent step, the complete set of admissible climate protection strategies which are compatibl...
Article
Full-text available
The ICLIPS model is an integrated assessment model of climate change that links global climate change with regional impacts and mitigation efforts by integrating components from different disciplines and various spatial scales. Its reduced-form impact module consists of climate impact response functions (CIRFs) that depict the regional sensitivity...
Article
Climate change is affecting all social groups and all economic sectors. The main societal response options are generally categorized into mitigation of climate change, which refers to constraining the amount and magnitude of climate change by reducing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases or enhancing their sinks, and adaptation, which compri...
Article
Full-text available
Social welfare functions (SWFs) are used in welfare-maximizing climate-economy models as objective functions to identify 'optimal' climate policies, to quantitatively compare alter- native policies, and to characterize the costs of achieving alternative normative constraints. This paper reviews the main SWFs that have been applied in climate policy...
Article
Full-text available
Simple climate-economy models are widely used for climate policy analysis, despite the limitations associated with their lack of regional and process detail. One of the main arguments brought forward in favour of these models is their transparency, which should enable researchers to easily interpret the simu-lation results and adapt the model desig...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyzes the statistical relationship between climatic factors and the global distribution of population and economic activity. Building on this analysis, a new method is developed for assessing geographically explicit impacts of climate change on the suitability of regions for human habitation and economic activity. This method combines...

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