The Impacts of Climate Change on Bonaire

Small islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their fragile ecosystems, small economies, and often extensive, low-lying coastal areas. Therefore, small islands, such as present in the Caribbean Netherlands, are expected to suffer excessively from rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, sea-level rise, coral bleaching, cyclones, droughts and floods. Despite this widespread conviction, scientific evidence of these effects in the Caribbean Netherlands is scarce, and as a result, limited adaptation strategies are developed or implemented by local and Dutch governmen... Mehr ...

Verfasser: van Beukering, Pieter
van Oosterhout, Lotte
Schep, Stijn
Duinmeijer, Chris
Dullaart, Job C.M.
Koks, Elco
Tiggeloven, Timothy
van Manen, Stan
Buijs, Sophie
de Boer, Maarten
van der Knaap, Marc
Baertz, Anna
Ouwersloot, Bodi
Dokumenttyp: Buch
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Verlag/Hrsg.: Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM)
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-26615982
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/073b38e5-dc3a-49b9-945b-11bf0ff2a5d3

Small islands are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their fragile ecosystems, small economies, and often extensive, low-lying coastal areas. Therefore, small islands, such as present in the Caribbean Netherlands, are expected to suffer excessively from rising temperatures, changes in precipitation, sea-level rise, coral bleaching, cyclones, droughts and floods. Despite this widespread conviction, scientific evidence of these effects in the Caribbean Netherlands is scarce, and as a result, limited adaptation strategies are developed or implemented by local and Dutch governments. In this study, an analysis is conducted assessing the impacts of climate change for the island of Bonaire. Given the uncertainty regarding the actual level of climate change in the future, four universally recognised scenarios are simulated, ranging from an optimistic scenario “SSP1-1.9” (corresponding to a mean temperature rise of 1.4°C at the end of the 21st century relative to pre-industrial levels), which assumes climate change will modestly increase relative to current levels, to a pessimistic scenario “SSP5-8.5” (corresponding to a mean temperature rise of 4.4°C at the end of the 21st century relative to pre-industrial levels), which suggests very high levels of climate change. Impacts are measured and reported at different moments in time, mainly looking at the years 2050 and 2150, representing short-term and long-term effects of climate change, respectively. A mix of methods from various scientific disciplines are used to estimate the impacts of climate change, including climate and flood models, ecological-economic models, as well as social-science methods such as social media analysis, participatory mapping and key-informant interviews. Although the sub-components of the study are systematically aligned and integrated, four topics can be distinguished: the estimation of the biophysical impacts, the modelling of economic effects, the identification of socio-cultural effects, and the exploration for potential ...