A GIS-based National Inventory of Risk Assessment Information for Climate Change Adaptation

Significant changes in climate and their impacts are already visible globally, and are expected to become more pronounced. Although there are some positive effects, many impacts are adverse. World-widely there is considerable scope for climate change adaptation planning and implementation in many areas, such as public health, water resources and management of ecosystems. In this respect, integrated climate risk management would be needed to include elements of risk management. In this respect of effective performance of risk assessment of climate change, Climate Change Adaptation Toolkit based on GIS (CCGIS) was developed at National Institute of Environmental Research, Korea, in order to support the decision maker for the climate change adapation process. The main in objective of CCGIS is to integrate and facilitate the database of various areas required to assess risks in association with climate change adaptation, for example climatological, meteorological, social, geographical, and economic data sets for the production of information on the efficient climate adaptation process by rapidly providing key information in the decision-making process. In generating the atmospheric meteorological data, GCM, RCM, GEOS-chem model was used as a tool to provide both past and future climate/meteorological variables to provide those for a wide range of assessments. Some examples of the CCGIS was presented and discussed here. In the case of an policy making, CCGIS can be developed to provide and conduct the climate change adaptation process with stepwise response procedures, information regarding the location of vulnerability and socio-economical information, and expert advice on treating individuals exposed to climate change. CCGIS can also be used to direct and guide the policy maker by identifying vulnerable zones and forecasting the climate variables. As our climate changes and the frequency and intensity of extreme events increases, it is important to understand both the sensitivity to these changes and adaptation planning, suggesting the toolkits for the importance of CCGIS and its effectiveness for providing the climatorogical, meteorological, socio-economic data in diagnosing and estimating vulnerable area under the future climate change.