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Climate Change and Regional Impacts

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Handbook of Regional Science

Abstract

The expected global impacts of climate change can be attributed to a set of common stressors. The magnitude of specific impacts, however, depends on the extent to which regional resources – from ecosystems to human-made infrastructures – are at risk and the abilities of regions to mitigate that risk. This chapter begins with an overview of some of the impacts expected from climate change, stratified by the density of populations and economic activities. Then we review differences in risk and mitigation capacities across major regions. The inherent interconnection of environmental, economic, and social dimensions of climate impacts underscores the need to assess climate change impacts in ways that address these dimensions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Daria A. Karetnikov

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University, College Park, USA

    Prof. Matthias Ruth

Authors
  1. Daria A. Karetnikov
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  2. Prof. Matthias Ruth
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daria A. Karetnikov .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Manfred M. Fischer

  2. and Business Administration Department of Spatial Economics, Free University Faculty of Economics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Peter Nijkamp

Appendix

Appendix

All economic data used in this report came as country-level indicators from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and Global Development Finance database and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. We use the latest available statistic from 2000 to 2010 for individual countries for the World Bank data and the latest available from 2000 to 2009 for the FAO data (World Bank 2011; FAO 2009). The countries are assigned regions according to the regions in the IPCC report and subregions using the UN Geoscheme categories because the IPCC report did not provide a country-by-country breakdown of the regions. We made the following modifications. Russia and Mongolia were placed in the Northern Asia region in line with the IPCC report. This is not a region within the UN Geoscheme. Several small island nations were not listed in the UN Geoscheme and were placed to the closest IPCC region. We also grouped Melanesia, Micronesia, and Oceania islands with the Australia and New Zealand region – although because of dearth of socioeconomic data for these nations, many of them were not included in the analysis. We renamed the Middle Africa region as the central African region for more consistency. All data listed is specified as either the average per country or the total data point for countries with available data for the region. All monetary figures are in current US dollars.

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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Karetnikov, D.A., Ruth, M. (2014). Climate Change and Regional Impacts. In: Fischer, M., Nijkamp, P. (eds) Handbook of Regional Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23430-9_57

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23430-9_57

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23429-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23430-9

  • eBook Packages: Business and Economics

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