What is Pacific Climate Futures about?

As a key initiative of the Pacific Climate Change Science Program "Pacific Climate Futures" assists decision makers and planners in 15 partner countries of the Asia-Pacific region in understanding how their climate has changed and how it may change in the future.

The Pacific Climate Futures web-tool has been designed to provide information and guidance in the generation of national climate projections and facilitate the generation of data for detailed impact and risk assessments.

This is achieved by a novel approach: Projections are classified using two climate variables such as rainfall and temperature, and grouped into so called “climate futures” (e.g. “hotter, drier” or “slightly warmer, much wetter”). Likelihoods are then assigned depending on the number of climate models that fall into each category

For the 15 partner countries national climate projections are available for:

• 10 climate variables
• three emissions scenarios: B1 (low), A1B (medium), A2 (high)
• and three time periods: 2030, 2055 and 2090
• using up to 18 global climate models

Pacific Climate Futures has three levels of detail:

The basic interface provides a summary of the projected changes in annual temperature and rainfall and is accessible for everyone.

Intermediate and Advanced levels provide progressively more flexibility to the user along with additional options for exporting data for use in risk assessments. Access is only available to registered users who have completed the necessary training.

For more information please refer to the User Guide and other documents provided in the Download Section.