As a gateway between ground and sea transportation, and as
a business location for service and industry, ports are of great significance for the regional and national economy. At the same time, port structures are located in regions threatened by storms and rising sea levels. Due to highly interdependent value chains,weather related disruptions in port operation can cause serious economic damage. Thus, adaptation to possible climate impacts seems like an obvious task for port authorities. The article analyses the climate vulnerability of German Baltic port locations.
The company Colocation IX GmbH is building a new data center in Bremen, and has decided upon the use of a new innovative cooling technology: Instead of traditional air conditioning to remove the waste heat from the servers, integral wells and geothermal probes are to provide energy-effi cient cooling in summer and heating energy for use in winter. The company is working together with the University of Bremen and the company Geo-En GmbH, which has expertise in integral wells. These alternatives to electrically driven compressor cooling will protect the environment through energy savings, help relieve the power grids, and at the same time ensure a decentralized and fail-safe cooling supply. The project has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research to the tune of €280,000. The co-payment share for ColocationIX GmbH amounts to €315,000.
The results of a survey of 4000 companies in the Bremen-Oldenburg metropolitan region in north-western Germany show that climate change is an ever more significant business management factor for companies. In this issue of SHORT AND SHARP, we present an overview of the risks and opportunities which various industries see ahead of them, and of the conclusions which can be drawn for adaptation strategies.
This work deal with a comparison between the common
"bathtub method" and a state-of-the-art hydrodynamic model, called MIKE21 HD Flow Model, for modelling storm surges. The aim of this study is to work out the differences between both approaches and to find out how probable differences look like. There is the question if the "bathtub method" represents flooding adequate or, if the consideration of physics by hydrodynamic models makes a major difference and displays maybe the "real" risk of
inundations. This work tries to underline the differences between those two approaches, where the strengths and weaknesses are and what influence those differences have for an inundation analysis. The investigation was made on a digital elevation model for the study area of Kiel, the capital city of the state Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. The two approaches were made on data for a small storm surge on the basis of water-level-change and wind-regime data from 2010.
Adaptation to climate change requires the implementation of new and revision of existing policies in order to change collective behaviour in a way that reduces vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. At the same time, the efficiency of environmental governance has been questioned due to perceived deficiencies in implementation in the past. As a consequence, it is observed that high levels of adaptive capacity are often not used for adaptive action, and therefore communities remain vulnerable. This thesis is looking at the socio-cognitive dimension of adaptation from the perspective of socio-cultural construction of values and practices that influence risk perceptions and behavioural intentions in coastal management and adaptation to climate variability and change. The construction of values and practices is analysed through discursive fields on the respective topics in local media from three states on the US mid-Atlantic coast.
The restaurant trade is increasingly facing delivery bottlenecks as a result of climate change, which may even cause interruptions of the production of food products. Due to reduced yields and at the same time increased resource requirements, cost pressures are rising. In order to face these challenges in a timely manner, the DEHOGA East Friesland & Weser-Ems District Association is developing climate adaptation strategies for the restaurant trade. In the present project, the effects of climate change are analyzed, and specific solution paths for the restaurant trade are developed and communicated within the DEHOGA District Association.
Based on concepts for innovation processes and co-production of knowledge, approaches are investigated that address the urgent and complex problems related to climate change, because especially the participation of, and close collaboration with, practice partners is needed. The paper presents the agricultural knowledge management approach in the organic agriculture module of the R&D project INKA BB (Innovation Network for Climate Change Adaptation Brandenburg Berlin) in north-eastern Germany (Knierim et al. 2009). The methodology for the science-practice collaboration follows an action research approach that supports the communication and cooperation of researchers and practitioners. The framework is the action research cycle with iterative stages of planning, action, and reflection. The organic agriculture module, which addresses individual research questions on several farms, is presented as a good practice example for close transdisciplinary network cooperation. The workshop contribution will provide reflections on the innovation development process over two project years.
The Protestant Hospital Service GmbH (eks) was founded in 1997. The catering service of the KS includes not only the delivery to hospitals, rehabilitation centers and senior citizens facilities, but also catering services for factory canteens, kindergartens and schools. The EKS has a total of 250 staff and prepares approximately 3500 meals per day in the cook-and-chill procedure. This permits it to de-link food preparation and food distribution, both spatially and chronologically. As a result of climate change, the availability and unquestioned quality of raw materials is ever more difficult to ensure. For these reasons, the KS is supplemented the existing concept of out-of-home catering with a new line of organically and regionally produced products.
Regional climate change projections show a changing climate in the metropolitan region of Hamburg for the end of the century: The temperature could increase and the precipitation in summer could decrease. To cope with the probably longer lasting and hotter summer conditions in Europe there are different possible adaptation measures in land management practice, e.g. forest conversion. That means the conversion of mostly coniferous forest monocultures to deciduous and mixed forests. Mixed forests are generally more adaptable in comparison to conifer forests. They ensure an increased groundwater recharge because of less canopy interception and reduced transpiration outside the growing season. An interesting question is how forest conversion would feedback to the regional climate under different climate conditions. To explore climate feedbacks, REMO (regional climate model at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg) is applied. To get a more realistic representation of the land surface, a current dataset from a digital basis landscape model of the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy is used instead of the standard representation of the land surface in REMO. In some areas of the metropolitan region of Hamburg the updated land surface increases the forest fraction. Additionally, all coniferous forest types are converted into broadleaf forest types to study the maximum impact on the simulated near surface climate. This set-up is used for a climate simulation with REMO, forced by ERA-INTERIM reanalysis data for the period of 1990-2008. Selected climate variables are analyzed and the associated processes are investigated: The different forest distributions affect particularly the evapotranspiration and thus the water- and energy cycle of the soil and the lower atmosphere. Especially, the effects in the very hot and dry year 2003 and in the wet year 2002 are analyzed. To study the impacts of the forest distributions under different climate conditions, a second climate simulation is set up with REMO, forced by ECHAM5-MPIOM for the historical period 1970-2000 and for the future time periods 2035-2065 and 2070-2100 under A1B emissions. This allows analyzing the impact of a changed forest cover under different climate conditions. It gives a first estimation of climate sensitivity.