Search

The world is not yet on track to meet the Paris Agreement climate change target of keeping global average temperature rise within 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Current greenhouse gas emission trends point to much more substantial warming, with possible increases of 4 °C or more in the long-term. This Special Issue describes findings from the IMPRESSIONS project which advanced the understanding of impacts of high-end climate change (defined as global mean temperatures > 2 °C above pre-industrial levels) and potential solutions for reducing these impacts through adaptation, mitigation and transformative actions. With stakeholders, the project developed a set of integrated climate and socio-economic scenarios and applied these to multi-sectoral impact models in five case studies: Hungary, Scotland, Iberia, Europe as a whole and Central Asia. This showed that benefits in some regions and sectors, such as increasing forest productivity in northern Europe, are offset by detrimental effects in others, such as severe water scarcity, heat stress and loss of productivity in southern Europe and parts of central and eastern Europe, and widespread flood damage. Adaptation and mitigation pathways were generated with stakeholders to address these impacts and identify integrated and transformative solutions. These highlighted the importance of shifting to sustainable lifestyles, good governance for sustainability and climate resilience, and new forms of integrated and sustainable resource management. The stakeholder-led approach of IMPRESSIONS ensured that the research was driven by the priorities of decision-makers, enabling significant co-learning and the identification of robust, innovative and effective solutions for addressing high-end climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional farming landscapes in the temperate zone that have persisted for millennia can be exceptionally species-rich and are therefore key conservation targets. In contrast to Europe's West, Eastern Europe harbours widespread traditional farming landscapes, but drastic socio-economic and political changes in the twentieth century are likely to have impacted these landscapes profoundly. We reconstructed long-term land-use/cover and biodiversity changes over the last 150 years in a traditional farming landscape of outstanding species diversity in Transylvania. We used the Regional Estimates of Vegetation Abundance from Large Sites model applied to a pollen record from the Transylvanian Plain and a suite of historical and satellite-based maps. We documented widespread changes in the extent and location of grassland and cropland, a loss of wood pastures as well as a gradual increase in forest extent. Land management in the socialist period (1947-1989) led to grassland expansion, but grassland diversity decreased due to intensive production. Land-use intensity has declined since the collapse of socialism in 1989, resulting in widespread cropland abandonment and conversion to grassland. However, these trends may be temporary due to both ongoing woody encroachment as well as grassland management intensification in productive areas. Remarkably, only 8% of all grasslands existed throughout the entire time period (1860-2010), highlighting the importance of land-use history when identifying target areas for conservation, given that old-growth grasslands are most valuable in terms of biodiversity. Combining datasets from different disciplines can yield important additional insights into dynamic landscape and biodiversity changes, informing conservation actions to maintain these species-rich landscapes in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]