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Climate Change in Portugal: Scenarios, Impacts, and Adaptation Measures - Fase II |
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Phase I
SIAM (Scenarios, Impacts and Adaptation Measures) started work in the summer of 1999, with funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, FCG, http://www.gulbenkian.pt/). The Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (Fundação da Ciência e da Tecnologia, FCT, http://www.fct.mct.pt/), added its support since January of 2000. The mandate is to carry out the first integrated assessment of the impacts of climate change in the country.
The work focuses on a core set of socioeconomic and biophysical impacts, and is based upon scenarios of future climate produced by climate models. The project is divided functionally into eleven groups, each of which contains an average of three student researchers (masters or doctoral students), and is guided by a coordinator. The coordinators are tenured professors or professional researchers affiliated with universities or research institutes, and are recognized experts in their respective fields of study, both within Portugal and internationally.
Of the eleven groups, two are responsible for the development of scenarios - one concerns climatic scenarios and the other socioeconomic scenarios. Another group is attempting to determine the level of awareness of the issue among key policymakers, while a third focuses on GIS and Remote Sensing. The remaining seven groups work at the level of impacts on specific sectors, and are: fisheries, forestry and biodiversity, human health, water resources, agriculture, coastal zones, and energy. Phase II Phase II of the project was initiated following publication of the Phase I report in 2002: 2002. F. D. Santos, K. Forbes, and R. Moita (eds.) Climate Change in Portugal. Scenarios, Impacts and Adaptation Measures - SIAM Project. Gradiva, Lisbon, Portugal (456 pp). This book was published in English to ensure the widest peer review possible and can be obtained from the  publisher.
Phase II, financed by the Portuguese Ministry of Cities, Spatial Planning, and the Environment continued the research started in phase I using updated climate models, with two additional components: an Outreach and a Case-Study component. The former involved a series of outreach sessions held across the country in Beja, Bragança, Covilhã, Ílhavo, Olhão, Peniche and Porto, in which the impacts of and adaptation measures to climate change upon locally relevant socio-economic sectors were discussed with a total of 125 representatives of government, academia, environmental NGOs, industry, and other representatives of civil society.
The case-study component, focusing predominantly on the Sado Estuary, sought to apply the general methodology of project SIAM (climate scenarios as an input to each sector's impact assessment) at a smaller geographic scale. The intention was to provide responses to decision makers in the public sector, at a scale compatible with decision making processes. The Sado Estuary was chosen as it is a geographic area where several socioeconomic and biophysical factors intersect, thus providing a good test for the methodology at a smaller scale.
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