Paulo Barbosa

European Commission | ec · Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Cities and local authorities are key players in addressing climate change. Since 2008, the European Commission (EC) endorses and supports their efforts through the Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (CoM) and notably through the provision of capacity building, technical assistance, sharing of best practices and peer learning opportunities....

In the past decades, and notably the last few years, droughts have severely impacted various interconnected socioeconomic sectors and ecosystems across the EU. These impacts encompass, among others, extensive losses in both rain-fed and irrigated agriculture, challenges and constraints in public water supply, disruptions in inland shipping, diminis...

In recent years droughts have had increasing impacts on various interconnected socio economic sectors and ecosystems throughout the EU. Impacts are projected to further increase under anthropogenic climate change for many sectors and regions. Structural collaboration between different Drought Observatories , impacted sectors and experts is necessar...

In recent years, droughts have had substantial impacts on nearly all regions of the EU, affecting several critical systems such as agriculture, water supply, energy, river transportation, and ecosystems. These impacts are projected to further increase due to climate change. While some of the drivers of drought risk are well known for some systems a...

The current drought conditions across the Parana-La Plata Basin (LPB) in Brazil-Argentina have been the worst since 1944. While this area is characterized by a rainy season with a peak from October to April, the hydrological year 2020-2021 was very deficient in rainfall, and the situation extended into the 2021-2022 hydrological year. Below-normal...

Cities and local authorities are key players in addressing climate change. Since 2008, the European Commission (EC) endorses and supports their efforts through the Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (CoM) and notably through the provision of capacity building, technical assistance, sharing of best practices and peer learning opportunities. T...

Cities and urban communities are at risk from climate change and vulnerable to its impacts with different levels of severity and multiple time-scales. Cities voluntarily committing to the Covenant of Mayors assess their risks and vulnerabilities and plan actions to increase their resilience. Spatial planning plays an important role in the climate c...

Cities and local authorities are key players in implementing the clean energy transition and addressing climate change. Since 2008, the European Commission endorses and supports their efforts through the Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (CoM) and notably through the provision of capacity building, technical assistance, sharing of best prac...

Una sequía extrema y persistente que comenzó en 2019 todavía hoy sigue afectando a la Cuenca del Plata, la segunda cuenca hidrográfica más grande de Sudamérica y la quinta del mundo. En el presente informe se ofrece una visión general del episodio, su contexto climatológico, su evolución espaciotemporal, sus causas y características y sus impactos...

Uma seca persistente e extrema iniciada em 2019 está ainda em curso e tem vindo a afetar a bacia de La Plata, a segunda maior bacia hidrográfica da América do Sul e a quinta maior do mundo. Apresentamos aqui uma panorâmica do evento, do seu contexto climatológico, da sua evolução espaciotemporal, das suas causas e características, bem como dos seus...

Adopting game-like approaches in capacity building activities allows obtaining effective results, in particular when dealing with complex issues such as climate change. A clear understanding of basic concepts might be indispensable to work with increasing complexity. For example, heat wave mortality estimates vary depending on the definition given...

It is a good practice to follow common guidelines in the computation of Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) data sets as part of operational drought monitoring systems. In the European Drought Observatory (https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/), reference statistics are computed following the World Meteorological Organization Guidelines on the Calculati...

A persistent and extreme drought started in 2019 is still ongoing and has been affecting the La Plata Basin, the second largest river basin in South America and the fifth in the world. Here we provide an overview of the event, its climatological background, its spatio-temporal evolution, its causes and characteristics, as well as its impacts on nat...

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...

One of the possible consequences of projected global warming is the progressive enlargement of drylands. This study investigates to what extent population and land-use (forests, pastures, and croplands) are likely to be in areas turning arid in the 21st century. The first part of the study focuses on the climatological enlargement of arid areas at...

Global warming is likely to cause a progressive drought increase in some regions, but how population and natural resources will be affected is still underexplored. This study focuses on global population, forests, croplands and pastures exposure to meteorological drought hazard in the 21st century, expressed as frequency and severity of drought eve...

Building on almost 10 years of expertise and operational application of the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI), which is implemented within the European Commission's European Drought Observatory (EDO) for the purposes of early warning and monitoring of agricultural droughts in Europe, this paper proposes a revised version of the index. The CDI concep...

Current trends in climate change indicate that the impact on the most vulnerable systems will increase. Urban areas, which concentrate population, economic activity and infrastructures, are sometimes at high-risk locations. Yet they are to be considered as vulnerable systems in need of harmonized structures supporting their efforts towards mitigati...

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) organised a workshop in Tenerife Island in 2017 called ‘Resilient Tenerife’, intended to explore participatory strategies to enhance climate resilience. An environmental expert from the Island Council of Gran Canaria was a member of one of the round tables and participated actively in various activities about the cas...

The exponential increase in water demand has been a focus since the 1970s in the well-known report on the “Limits to growth”. Today, freshwater availability is considered one of the nine planetary boundaries, along with biosphere integrity, climate change and ocean acidification, among others. Water is essential not only to sustain life on Earth, b...

The European Commission established the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative in 2008, aimed at involving and supporting mayors to encourage accomplishing the European Union (EU) climate mitigation and energy targets. In 2014, the Mayors Adapt initiative was set up in order to promote the climate adaptation pillar. Whereas the mitigation pillar is mo...

Building on almost ten years of expertise and operational application of the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI), which is operationally implemented within the European Commission’s European Drought Observatory (EDO) for the purposes of early warning and monitoring of agricultural droughts in Europe, this paper proposes a revised version of the index....

Two questions motivated this study: 1) Will meteorological droughts become more frequent and severe during the 21 st century? 2) Given the projected global temperature rise, to what extent does the inclusion of temperature (in addition to precipitation) in drought indicators, play a role in future meteorological droughts? To answer, we analyzed the...

Hydrological drought is currently underrepresented in global monitoring systems, mainly due the shortage of near real-time estimates of river discharge at the global scale. In this study, the outputs of the Lisflood model are used to define a low-flow drought index, which shows a good correspondence with long-term records of the Global Runoff Data...

This report presents the analysis of the available climate risk and vulnerability assessments and adaptation action plans implemented by 40 European local authorities in the framework of the Covenant of Mayors.

The operational monitoring of long-term hydrological droughts is often based on the standardised precipitation index (SPI) for long accumulation periods (i.e., 12 months or longer) as a proxy indicator. This is mainly due to the current lack of near-real-time observations of relevant hydrological quantities, such as groundwater levels or total wate...

The Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa (CoM SSA) supports local authorities in Sub-Saharan Africa in the climate challenge and in their efforts in ensuring access to clean energy. It is one of the "Regional Covenant" of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy (GCoM).This document has been prepared to assist Sub-Saharan Africa local...

This fifth edition of the United Nations Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) is being issued four years after the adoption of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (Sendai Framework). Now is a time of heightened global urgency, and the need for ambitious collective action to reduce disaster risk, build res...

Global drought projections are commonly based on Global Climate Models (GCMs), which can provide reliable prediction at medium or low spatial resolution. Instead, the use of Regional Climate Models (RCMs) and Empirical Statistical Downscaling (ESD), driven by GCMs, can provide information at higher spatial resolution, thus addressing the regional c...

In the context of a progressively warming World, it is fundamental to develop a common strategy aiming at a more sustainable local and global development. In Europe, the Covenant of Mayors was launched in 2008 with the ambition to gather local governments voluntarily committed to achieving the European Union climate and energy targets. This initiat...

Study region: This study has three spatial scales: global (0.5°), macro-regional, and country scale. The database of drought events has specific entries for each macro-region and country. Study focus: We constructed a database of meteorological drought events from 1951 to 2016, now hosted by the Global Drought Observatory of the European Commissio...

During the last 20 years, Argentina experienced several extreme and widespread droughts in many different regions, including the core cropland areas. The most devastating recent events were recorded in the years 2006, 2009 and 2011. Reported impacts of the main events induced losses of more than 4 billion U.S. dollars and more than 1 million person...

In the context of global warming, droughts are increasingly threatening our societies. They last for months or even years, affecting wide areas and large numbers of people, with single drought events sometimes causing economic damages for several billion Euros. Besides the economic damages, droughts can compromise ecosystems and threat food securit...

The study assesses how climate change could affect Europe in eleven impact areas. Under a high warming scenario, several climate impacts show a clear geographical northsouth divide. Most of the welfare losses, assessed for six impact areas, would be greatly reduced under a 2ᵒC scenario. ► How to cite: ◄ Ciscar Martinez, J.-C., Ibarreta Ruiz, D.,...

Even though meteorological drought events have been a normal pattern in the Canary Islands during the last centuries, annual rainfall shows a decline in Gran Canaria. Hydrological droughts are recurrent in Gran Canaria due to historical water management systems. Water has been slowly (but gradually) privatised. Natural springs dried out and aquifer...

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre checks the eligibility of the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAP) and carries out an analysis of the information submitted by the EU Covenant of Mayors signatories. This quality control is carried out by means of a set of assessment criteria that contributes to guaranteeing the credibi...

Drought vulnerability assessments are the first steps in the identification of the underlying causes of drought impacts. There is no single factor or measure that can entirely represent the complexity of drought vulnerability. However, this multidimensional nature of vulnerability can be conceptualised and divided into different subgroups or compon...

On 2 and 3 November 2017, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre organised a workshop on resilience in Tenerife. It was attended by a variety of people (academics, social actors and members of the public) with expertise on both the definition of the concept of ‘resilience’ and the implications it would have for the island of Tenerife. For...

Heat waves and Saharan dust outbreaks have been acquiring more frequency and intensity in the Canary Islands during the last decades. Both climatic hazards are known to produce impacts on human health such as mortality (due to heat waves) and morbidity (due to dusty weather). This work addresses possible climate adaptation policies in Tenerife assu...

Meaningful seasonal prediction of drought conditions is key information for end-users and water managers, particularly in Latin America where crop and livestock production are key for many regional economies. However, there are still not many studies of the feasibility of such a forecasts at continental level in the region. In this study, precipita...

Drought affects every year a large number of people and its impacts are difficult to be quantified because the effects can last for years after its termination. This study analyzes meteorological droughts, evaluated using two indicators, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), c...

We present a world meteorological drought climatology for the period 1981-2100 under two different climate scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). As input data, we selected monthly precipitation and minimum-maximum temperature from 1981 to 2100 from more than a hundred simulations-representing the combinations between more than 15 GCMs and 15 RCMs-from the...

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...

Los días 2 y 3 de noviembre de 2017, el Centro Común de Investigación de la Comisión Europea organizó unas jornadas de resiliencia en Tenerife. En estas jornadas participaron expertos con diferentes perfiles (académicos, actores sociales y ciudadanos), tanto en la definición del concepto “resiliencia”, como en las implicaciones que tendría para la...

As a result of climate change in recent past and unsustainable land management, drought became one of the most impacting disasters and, with the projected global warming, it is expected to progressively cause more damages by the end of the 21st century. This study investigates changes in drought occurrence, frequency, and severity in Europe in the...

Projections of drought hazard (dH) changes have been mapped from five bias-corrected climate models and analyzed at the global level under three representative concentration pathways (RCPs). The motivation for this study is the observation that drought risk is increasing globally and the effective regulation of prevention and adaptation measures de...

A participatory scenario building process for small island resilience is carried out for the Tenerife Island (Canary Islands, Spain). The plot of the scenarios is based on institutional analyses and participatory techniques where key local stakeholders and citizens were engaged. A press analysis was done in order to identify the main narratives reg...

Adaptation to climate change has been considered to be crucial to current societies, especially for small islands. In this paper the case of Tenerife (in the Canary Islands) is analysed. Tenerife is a small island located northwest of the African continent, in the Atlantic Ocean. Tenerife presents a high vulnerability to heatwaves and Saharan dust...

Adaptation to climate change has been considered to be crucial to current societies, especially for small islands. In this paper the case of Tenerife (in the Canary Islands) is analysed. Tenerife is a small island located northwest of the African continent, in the Atlantic Ocean. Tenerife presents a high vulnerability to heatwaves and Saharan dust...

Global warming has been stated to be unequivocal and human influenced. The emissions and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased to a degree that they are producing disturbances to the world climatic system. Several climate change impacts have occurred, while others will occur or will be intensified in the future. Ocean acidif...

How do we manage water in cities? Where does our drinking water come from? Where does our waste water go? How much water do we consume? Is our life-style affecting our water? This first overview of Urban Water Management in Europe explains and illustrates water in an unprecedented way, reflecting how water flows through the arteries of our cities....

In the last decades, droughts have become increasingly recurrent and intense over large areas of Europe. Due to the projected temperature increase and longer dry periods, meteorological droughts are expected to become more frequent and severe in the next decades, potentially causing relevant impacts in many economic sectors and the environment. To...

Tenerife ha venido registrando no sólo un aumento general de la temperatura media anual de 1,5° C en el último siglo (en el Parque Nacional del Teide), sino también un incremento en la frecuencia e intensidad de las olas de calor. La estabilidad atmosférica producida por la llegada de estas olas de calor, junto a las emisiones industriales y de dif...

Droughts are a recurrent climatic event in many parts of the world which intensity and duration are the main causes of important economic losses and disruption in rural and urban activities. It is expected in the near future more intense droughts due to the climatic changes in the past years and, at the same time the affected territories will expan...

Abstract A global map of drought risk has been elaborated at the sub-national administrative level. The motivation for this study is the observation that little research and no concerted efforts have been made at the global level to provide a consistent and equitable drought risk management framework for multiple regions, population groups and econ...

Observational records from 1950 onwards and climate projections for the 21st century provide evidence that droughts are a recurrent climate feature in large parts of Europe, especially in the Mediterranean, but also in western, south-eastern and central Europe. Trends over the past 60 years show an increasing frequency, duration and intensity of dr...

Drought is a natural hazard triggered by a lack of precipitation that can last for several months or years. Droughts can affect a wide range of socio-economic sectors while the related direct and indirect impacts are often difficult to quantify. In this context, drought damage refers to the total or partial destruction of physical assets in the aff...