Making climate impact science more accessible to the public: ISIpedia launch

“ISIpedia will grow and mature,” says Frieler. “It is our aim to put the evidence on the table that citizens as well as businesses and policy-makers, can take best-informed decisions when it comes to acting on the climate crisis.”

Articles on the new platform all fall into three categories: The first one is ‘Observed impacts’ and about questions such as ‘Is the reported increase in flood induced damages already induced by climate change?’. The second category is ‘Model evaluation’, i.e. the questions whether the tools to project climate impacts into the future are good enough. Are the crop-models for example able to reproduce the strong drop in maize yields that has been observed in the US at very high temperatures? The third category is ‘future projections’ and really about risks climate change will pose to natural systems and our societies. ISIpedia makes climate impacts concrete on the country level. For example, policy makers and adaptation planners from Egypt can learn that, assuming a +2 °C warming level, their country is on top of the ranking of people exposed to river flooding. China, a top global emitter, is on rank 24 and hence also increasingly exposed.

The name ISIpedia is a short form for Inter-Sectoral Impacts Encyclopedia. It is based on research carried out under the Inter-sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) which is working with roughly 100 research groups worldwide. By systematically comparing the different computer simulations of climate impacts, the project is working towards consistent robust projections of climate change impacts across different sectors and scales. The ISIpedia portal is free, open-access and professional users can download the processed data used in the analyses as well as the raw data.

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