The NFCS coordinates collaboration between climate service providers and users to facilitate the creation of user driven climate services. The NFCS supports the development of Sectoral Adaptation Plans (SAP) through focused engagement with project teams to provide tailored services and information.
Along with data, the NFCS is your guide to climate science, services and information during the development and implementation of your SAPs.
Sectoral Adaptation Plans Guidelines
Sectoral Adaptation Plans development are now under following NAF 2024 publication. The associated Sectoral Guidelines document has now been published (which you can find below), paving the way for sectors to start the process.
The guidelines document sets out 6 steps for developing your plan. The NFCS across all its members, can support the development of SAPs at each and every step.
To find out more about any of the below supports, contact the NFCS Helpdesk.
NFCS SAP Support
The NFCS offers sectoral support throughout every step of the SAP process. This support ranges from information on Ireland’s climate and weather events, to climate services to support decision-making.
See below for more information on how the NFCS can support the development of your Sectoral Adaptation Plan.
Step 1: Preparing the ground
Developing a key understanding of both the climate of Ireland and climate change is essential to be able to develop a Sectoral Adaptation Plan. Building a baseline understanding of these topics will provide a platform to enable the development of smart adaptation actions relevant to each sector.
To understand the Climate of Ireland and Climate Change and what it is that drives it, there are a number of resources available across the NFCS.
Introductory Information
To gain an understanding of what drives Ireland’s climate and weather patterns visit the Climate of Ireland webpage.
To further your knowledge on the basics of climate change, follow the link to the climate change page below.
Step 2: Climate Impact Screening
The climate impact screening step is a key step in understanding the type of adaptation actions you need to develop in order to adapt your sector to changing climate conditions. This step requires sectors to catalogue the weather and climate conditions that have impacted them in both past and future contexts. To help sectors build this profile, the NFCS suggests using the below information and webpages as sources of past events and the potential future climate in Ireland.
To prepare and build a profile of weather and climate events that have impacted your sector, it is important to have a list of the major events that have happened and when they happened.
From a national perspective, the below timeline accounts for major weather events across Ireland.
[INSERT TIMELINE GRAPHIC]
To develop a similar timeline for your specific sector, follow the link below to the major weather events page where all the historic weather and climate pages have been documented.
Step 3: Prioritisation
When developing a SAP there are many risks and impacts that you could address. However, it is important to be able to prioritise the critical and most impactful risks on your sector. This exercise allows SAP developers to understand where their sector is most at risk to climate. The NCCRA has developed a risk register, detailing the most appropriate risks in an Irish context to focus on when developing a SAP.
NCCRA Risk Register
[AWAITING PUBLICATION]
Step 4: Priority Impact Assessment
This is the stage of the process where climate information and services are critical to support decision-making. It is essential to have the appropriate supporting climate data to understand the future risk to a sector to climate change. Undertaking a climate risk-assessment to understand how climate hazards will impact the exposure and vulnerability to your sector is essential for decision-making.
The NFCS can offer supports in a range of different ways during the Priority Impact Assessment step of the process.
TRANLSATE – Standardised Climate Projections for Ireland
The TRANSLATE project is a Met Éireann lead initiative to standardise future climate projections for Ireland and develop climate services that meet the climate information needs of decision makers.
TRANSLATE offers future climate projections that align with NCCRA technical guidance and can support the development of SAPs. The projections allow users to examine what Ireland may look like in a future climate at present day, mid-century and end of century timescales and across different potential emission pathways (RCPs), from early action to late action.
TRANSLATE data is freely available to all on Climate Ireland’s data explorer, or by contacting Ireland’s Climate Service helpdesk – nfcs@met.ie.
Sea Level Rise Data
Sea level rise has currently been projected out to 2300 to rise across all possible future emission scenarios. Consequently, sea levels are expected to rise for all Irish coastal areas with varying degrees of rise dependent on location.
As a result, there will be a varying level of impact across the different sectors. Current sea level rise information comes from satellite observations and global sea level rise projections.
However, there is a lot of uncertainty associated with these projections and a limited understanding of the effects that contribute to sea level rise and the rate it rises. Satellite observations indicate sea level around Ireland has risen by approximately 2-3mm per year since the 1990s. Global projections suggest an increase of approximately 0.4m to 0.8m respectively for very low and very high emission scenarios relative to a 1986-2005 baseline.
While these projections offer a general trend of sea level rise, the local level perspective is lost. And, considering the variability across location, this is essential for taking action.
In the absence of a standardised suit of sea level rise projections for Ireland, the NFCS recommends the following approach to sea level rise data.
Climate Risk Assessments
Climate risk assessments are an essential part of the process for developing an adaptation plan to climate change. Undertaking risk assessment provides a scientific evidence base to the future climate risk. A more detailed assessment enables sectors to understand future climate and weather-related hazards and impacts accounting for spatial and temporal variations in these and associated uncertainties.
This detailed assessment can also facilitate the contribution of exposure and vulnerability metrics, ensuring a comprehensive view of future climate risks is defined.
There are two types of data driven risk assessments:
- Semi-quantitative
- Fully-quantitative
Semi-Quantitative Risk Assessment
Semi-quantitative risk assessment is an established approach to climate risk assessment. Implemented not only by the new Irish NCCRA being developed by EPA, but also follows best practice internationally from EU, UK and New Zealand climate change risk assessments.
This approach provides a more detailed understanding of the climate change risks and opportunities and adds scientific weighting to an assessment of climate risk. Semi-quantitative studies can be the first step to understanding and highlighting potential climate risks and can inform you when a fully-quantitative study is required.
Offering sectors the ability to define climate risk is important. Through the incorporation of climate data, and sector specific exposure and vulnerability metrics, the semi-quantitative risk assessment can do this.
TRANSLATE Semi-quantitative risk assessment framework
As part of the TRANSLATE project, the project team developed a semi-quantitative risk assessment framework. The framework provides a step-by-step guide to a risk assessment, with the ability to tailor it to the individual user.
The framework is hosted by Met Éireann and the NFCS who can work closely with each sector to calculate a risk assessment specific to them.
This risk assessment approach incorporates future climate projection hazard data from TRANSLATE and sector specific data on exposure and vulnerability. The assessment is GIS based and allows for a visual representation of the produced climate risk.